Ransom by Rachel Schurig
Publication date: April 28th 2014
Genres: Contemporary, New Adult, Romance
Synopsis:
**The first book in a brand new series from USA Today bestselling author Rachel Schurig. This New Adult Contemporary Romance novel is a complete story with no cliffhanger.**
Daisy Harris has no reason to suspect that her day will be any different than usual. She’ll go to class, alone. She won’t speak or make eye contact. She’ll spend her entire day doing her best to go completely unnoticed. That’s what life is like for Daisy now—an endless cycle of loneliness and fear. A life lived hiding behind the walls she so faithfully maintains.
Then she sees it. A magazine, left behind in class. A simple picture—just his face. And it changes everything.
It’s been a year since she’s seen Daltrey Ransome. A year since he and his brothers left town to pursue their dreams of rock and roll superstardom. A year since he left Daisy behind—left her to watch as everything she knew crumbled around her. She’s been running from Daltrey ever since, desperate to keep her secret.
But she can’t run anymore. And now that Daltrey has found her—the girl he’s loved his entire life, the girl he’d give up everything for—he’s determined never to let her go again.
Excerpt:
I wake up, alone in a dark hotel
room, my heart racing, scared out of my mind. When I finally figure
out where the hell I am, I rub my aching chest. I’m glad I’m not
on the bus, glad there’s no one in here to see me like this. I’m
pretty sure the wetness I feel on my cheeks is tears, and my brothers
would never let me live that down.
Knowing sleep isn’t going to
return anytime soon, I climb out of bed and head for the mini bar. I
grab a cold beer, even though I could probably use something
stronger. You’re too
young for a drinking problem.
So-called rock star or
not.
I take the beer to the small
balcony of my room and lean against the railing, looking out over the
lights of Memphis. We played a kick-ass show, and I should still be
on a high from it. The crowd was amazing. Everything felt right in
the world, for a few brief hours. I could forget about the knowledge
that I’d traveled halfway across the country without actually
seeing any of it. Forget the fact that the tour bus, though more
luxurious than our old van, was cramped and starting to make me feel
claustrophobic. Forget about how tired I was and how my throat hurt
pretty much every day now. When we played like that, when we somehow
managed to tap into that almost magical, synched-up, out-of-body
place I can’t even describe, I could forget about all the shitty
stuff and remember why we were doing this in the first place.
I had felt that tonight, for the
first time in weeks, and the sensation had been fantastic. I should
have slept like a baby. But here I was again, drinking a beer by
myself at three in the morning.
I keep having dreams about her.
Which is pretty fucking
ridiculous because I haven’t talked to the girl in about a year.
Daisy made it perfectly clear that, for whatever reason, she was done
with me—just like that, years of friendship, gone. And I don’t
even know what the hell I did.
Okay, so I left, but she always
knew that was going to happen. We planned for it, for Christ’s
sake. Worked for it. Both
of us. She had every bit as much to do with our success as anyone in
the band. She was our biggest supporter, our loudest critic. We never
performed a song without her hearing it first, never played a gig
without her there. She was with us on that first horrible so-called
tour, riding around Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana to all those
dingy dive bars. She helped us plaster the towns with our flyers and
sell our homemade CDs, just waiting for our big chance.
And when it came, when we got the
call from Grey Skies that they wanted us to open for them, she was
there then, too. She sat at our kitchen table, just like she had a
thousand times before, waiting with bated breath for my dad to get
off the phone with their manager. When he finally hung up and
confirmed that our big break had appeared, she was the first person I
grabbed as the kitchen erupted around us. She was happy for me—not
the fake kind of happy that you think another person wants to see.
She was genuinely, honest-to-God,
screaming-her-face-off-while-hugging-me happy.
The only bad thing about those
hectic, heady weeks before the tour was leaving her. I wanted to tell
her then, the thing I’d always known but been too afraid to say,
but I didn’t. I couldn’t imagine saying those three words—finally
saying them, out loud, not just in my head where I imagined it
constantly—and then leaving. So I held my tongue, and my tears, as
I hugged her one last time before heading for the airport.
Maybe I should have said it.
Maybe then she wouldn’t have disappeared the way she did. But I had
a plan, damn it. I was going to come back, take her to her prom, the
way we always talked about, and drop the bomb that I wanted us to be
more. The way it played out in my head was that she’d be so happy
she’d be willing to leave with me. She would forget about the
business school she never really wanted to attend to come on tour
with us. I wanted to experience this with her. I wanted to show her
the world.
Taking another sip of beer, I
wonder—not for the first time—what in the hell I could have done
to piss her off so much. She stopped taking my calls about three
months after we left for California. By then we’d recorded our
album and started to tour as the openers for Grey Skies. I used to
call her every night, eager to tell her all about life on the road in
a proper tour. We had a lot more free time back then, and I was
actually getting a chance to do things in the towns where we stopped.
Was that it? Was she jealous?
But that wasn’t like Daisy. I
cannot imagine that she would throw away a thirteen-year friendship
out of jealousy. It didn’t make any sense. But one day, she didn’t
answer when I called. And didn’t respond to my voice mail. Or my
increasingly panicked text messages. My emails went unanswered, too.
I tried for weeks to reach her,
calling her house, her phone, her dad’s phone. He told me flat out
she didn’t want to talk to me, but I still couldn’t accept it.
Even when her cell number was disconnected, when my emails started to
come back with the message that there was no such address, I didn’t
get it. It wasn’t until she finally called me to cancel our prom
plans that I realized what she’d been trying to tell me: She didn’t
want to have anything to do with me.
I replay those weeks all the
time, wondering what I could have done differently. I always come
back to the same thing: I should have gone home. I should have told
my dad to screw himself and gotten on a plane. They could have
managed without me for a few days. Even if they couldn’t, even if
it would have jeopardized our chance to open for Grey Skies, I should
have done it anyway. Daisy was worth it.
But I didn’t. And now she’s
away at college, probably having the time of her life, forgetting all
about her old friend. I can see her so clearly, sitting on a green
lawn, surrounded by friends, like some fucking commercial, her brown
curls blowing in the breeze as she laughs. The image makes my chest
ache again. She’s
gone, man. Accept
it.
I
look out over the city again, my beer bottle empty. She is gone,
hundreds of miles away, totally out of my reach. And I’m here,
alone in the middle of the night, haunted by memories of the only
girl I ever loved.
About the author:
Rachel Schurig lives in the metro Detroit area with her dog, Lucy.
She loves to watch reality TV and she reads as many books as she can get
her hands on. In her spare time, Rachel decorates cakes. Her THREE
GIRLS series is available now from Amazon!
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Faith Sullivan is an author of New Adult contemporary romances including the HEARTBEAT trilogy, the TAKE ME NOW series and the 9/11 novel, UNEXPECTED. She writes love stories with a little dash of crazy.
