Jay Crownover - Charged

Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

The News Building

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Harper 2016

Copyright © Jennifer M Voorhees 2016

Cover design by Studio Takoma © HarperCollinsPublishers 2016

Cover photograph © Fotosearch/Getty Images

Jennifer M Voorhees asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008116279

Ebook Edition © May 2016 ISBN: 9780008116286

Version: 2016-05-06

Dedicated to the one person that has held my hand through all my worst decisions and cheered me on through all my amazing ones … this book and this story about bad decisions leading to the best things in life is for you, Mom.

You’re just the best, and every mistake I’ve ever made, every bad choice I’ve blindly made, you’ve been there to pick up the pieces afterwards.

Luckily, I do indeed have some pretty awesome stories to tell after everything is said and done, and all the storms have passed. But nothing makes me happier than knowing that none of those tales of wonder and of woe would have had a happy ending if I hadn’t been able to share them with you.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction

Chapter 1: Avett

Chapter 2: Quaid

Chapter 3: Avett

Chapter 4: Quaid

Chapter 5: Avett

Chapter 6: Quaid

Chapter 7: Avett

Chapter 8: Quaid

Chapter 9: Avett

Chapter 10: Quaid

Chapter 11: Avett

Chapter 12: Quaid

Chapter 13: Avett

Chapter 14: Quaid

Chapter 15: Avett

Chapter 16: Quaid

Chapter 17: Avett

Chapter 17.5: Church

Chapter 18: Quaid

Chapter 19: Avett

Epilogue: Quaid

Author’s Note

Avett and Quaid’s Playlist

Acknowledgments

Keep Reading – Riveted

Keep Reading – Built

Keep Reading – Rule

About the Author

Also by Jay Crownover

About the Publisher

She’s immature.

She’s a brat.

She’s annoying and not very nice.

Why is she getting a story?

Whenever I have a character that seems like they shouldn’t get a story or like they might not deserve some kind of happiness, they are inevitably the characters that I most want to turn it all around for. I want to know their stories more than anything, and I want to dig into why there might be more to them than we initially see. It happened with Asa, and it happened with Avett from the minute she touched the page. I always knew I wanted Brite’s daughter to get a story, but I had no clue how layered, complex, and difficult that story was going to be. She’s a hurricane all right, and watching the storm break on the shore has made for some of my most favorite writing to date. I never start out with a character determined to make the reader like them, but I do hope that by the end of the journey, the reader understands the character and maybe even sympathizes with them a little bit … and hey, if you do end up liking that character you were so sure you hated … score one for me. <3 (Looking at you, Melissa Shank!)

I think Avett is the character that speaks the most to the person I was at the same point in my life. As I was writing her I kept cringing and thinking, yep … been there and done that, and now I definitely have a story to tell about those choices and the consequences they led to. Sometimes the story is the best part of screwing up, and really, no matter who we are or where we’ve been in life, we all have a story to tell. I feel that for all my characters, but for some reason it really, really rang true with Avett and Quaid.

When I was twenty-two I made a lot of questionable choices: about men, money, school, and my future in general. I had to be rescued (by family, not a handsome fella, which was a total bummer for me!) and one would think I learned my lesson because I was sure that was as low as I was ever going to get. Flash forward to my early thirties when things once again fell apart because of my bad choices and my foolish stubbornness. There I was for the second time in my life needing to be saved with more stories to tell and harsh lessons learned. (That story involves Rule getting published and my whole life changing, so even though it starts with heartbreak, it ends with a dream come true.)

So go out there and screw up. Have experiences so that you have stories to tell, and do it without an apology.

Memories and mistakes are both beautiful and important in their own ways.

Love and Ink,

Jay

All things truly wicked start from innocence.

—Ernest Hemingway

Don’t worry, Sprite, bad decisions always make for good stories …

I could hear my dad’s gruff voice, lightened with humor, in my ear as he told me those words every single time I got caught doing something I wasn’t supposed to do when I was growing up. I was always doing something I shouldn’t then and now, so I heard those words a lot from him. Unfortunately, as an adult, my bad decisions resulted in consequences far worse than a scraped knee or a broken wrist from falling out of the tree in the backyard he warned me repeatedly wasn’t sturdy enough to climb. And sadly, my dad reassuring me in his firm and gentle way, while calling me his little Sprite as he kissed my boo-boos, wasn’t going to help my current situation at all.

This boo-boo was big-time.

This boo-boo was life-changing.

This boo-boo was anything but a good story waiting to be told.

This boo-boo very well could be the end of me, the end of the rope where my patient parents had dangled precariously for years, and it very well could be the end of any kind of future I may have had. A future I was well on my way to letting a lifetime of bad decisions and even worse choices screw up. At barely twenty-two, bad decisions had sort of become my stock in trade and were as familiar to me as my own face. I was almost legendary, at this point, for putting all my trust in the absolutely worst kind of people. If there was a wrong path to take, I was going to skip gleefully down that road and not look back until I ended up exactly in the kind of situation I found myself in at the moment. It wasn’t like this was even a new dead end; it was the same one I ran into over and over again. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get myself turned around, and the longer I was circling this dead end, the darker and more wicked it became.

I knew better. I really did, even if there was a boatload of evidence contradicting that fact.