Lost
Girls
by
Merrie Destefano
Publication
Date: January 3, 2017
Publisher: Entangled Teen
Fight
Club meets Black Swan—Rachel wakes up in a ditch to find she doesn’t remember
the last year of her life, and that everything—including herself—is vastly
different than she remembers.
Yesterday,
Rachel went to sleep listening to Taylor Swift, curled up in her grammy’s
quilt, worrying about geometry. Today, she woke up in a ditch, bloodied,
bruised, and missing a year of her life.
She
doesn’t recognize the person she’s become: she’s popular. She wears nothing but
black.
Black
to cover the blood.
And
she can fight.
Tell
no one.
She’s
not the only girl to go missing within the last year…but she’s the only girl to
come back. She desperately wants to unravel what happened to her, to try and
recover the rest of the Lost Girls.
But
the more she discovers, the more her memories return. And as much as her new
life scares her, it calls to her. Seductively. The good girl gone bad, sex,
drugs, and raves, and something darker…something she still craves—the rush of
the fight, the thrill of the win—something she can’t resist, that might still
get her killed…
The
only rule is: There are no rules.
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His Harley was parked at the curb, in a
pocket of shadow, blocked from the streetlight and behind one of the flowering
trees Dad had planted earlier this year. Dylan started to hand me a helmet, but
stopped, as if there was something else more important.
“There’s something I have to do,” he
said.
I thought maybe he needed to give me a
few pointers on how to ride a motorcycle, that I should lean into the curves,
that I should hold onto him, that I shouldn’t be afraid because he was a great
driver.
I was wrong.
He slipped one arm around my waist and
pulled me close, so close that I couldn’t have gotten away if I wanted to,
while his other hand cupped my jaw, thumb just below my mouth, long fingers
brushing against my ear. “I’ve wanted to do this since you got back,” he said,
his voice a low, hoarse whisper.
I wanted to say, me, too, but I
didn’t get a chance.
His lips found mine in the darkness
where we could barely see each other, where the heat of his body melted into
mine. There were two short, gentle kisses as if he didn’t believe I would be
here very long, that I might disappear at any moment, and then after that came
the third kiss—
The third kiss stole my heart.
And my soul.
I didn’t remember our first date or
what we had in common or who was his favorite band, but I remembered this. I
remembered a thousand kisses, a hundred nights, a million stars glittering
overhead. We leaned into each other, as if we were each drawing an electric
charge from the other, as if we’d been unplugged and powerless but now we were
stronger, invincible, immortal. The world stopped spinning and we were all that
existed; there were no other people, no cities, no countries; there was only
this.
His lips pressed against mine, his
scent filling the air, his hands touching me.
And then at last, the kiss ended and we
stared into each other’s eyes, me remembering, him knowing, both of us
breathless.
“I almost lost you,” he said, his words
soft as if he couldn’t say them very loud because it would show how strong the
emotion was.
“I’m here, I’m safe.”
He shook his head. “I’m not going to
let anything happen to you,” he said. “I haven’t always been”—he hesitated—“a
very good person. But I’m going to do everything I can to make sure no one ever
hurts you again.”
He had a way of enchanting me with his
words, maybe it was the poet in him, maybe this was easy for him, but it didn’t
matter. I knew he was telling the truth.
I just didn’t know if I wanted to be
safe.
CURRENTLY A FULL-TIME NOVELIST and
magazine editor, Merrie Destefano’s next novel, LOST GIRLS, releases on January
3, 2017. Her other novels include AFTERLIFE and FEAST, both published by
HarperCollins, and FATHOM, which was self-published. The editor of Victorian
Homes magazine, she has also been the editor of American Farmhouse Style,
Vintage Gardens, and Zombies magazine, and was the founding editor of Cottages
& Bungalows magazine.
With 20 years experience in
publishing, she worked for a variety of publishing/broadcasting companies that
include Focus on the Family, The Word For Today, and PJS Publications (now
Primedia). Besides editing and writing, her background includes print buying,
writing/producing radio promos, directing photo shoots, developing new
products, writing jacket copy for books, creating sales media packets and
organizing direct mail campaigns.
Born in the Midwest, she currently
lives in Southern California with her husband, two German shepherds, a Siamese
cat and the occasional wandering possum. Her favorite hobbies are reading
speculative fiction and watching old Star Trek episodes, and her incurable
addiction is writing. She loves to camp in the mountains, walk on the beach,
watch old movies, listen to alternative music—although rarely all at the same
time.
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