Karen Preston, an ambitious gallery owner who doesn't believe in love or making sacrifices for nothing, has her life turned upside down thanks to an accident caused by the reckless driving of Taylor Grey, a billionaire socialite. Born into an average, middle-class family, Karen has struggled all her life to rise above her station and make a name for herself. She is a driven, independent woman who loathes to depend or rely on anyone. Now unable to work and with pending debts to investors and artists, Karen finds herself in a compromising position – lose all she has worked for or seek help from the one person who cannot refuse, the person who jeopardized her future – Taylor Grey. Under the insistence of his controlling father, Marshal Grey, Taylor must help Karen but Marshal Grey has specific demands of his own: to keep the details of the accident out of the public eye, Karen and Taylor are to live together in a remote estate owned by the Grey family until Karen is fully healed. Neither Karen nor Taylor wants this arrangement. Karen resents Taylor's presence and rejects his every attempt to help, while Taylor, guilt-ridden and angry, feels equally trapped by his father's demands. Can the independent Karen stay locked down and can the carefree Taylor restrain himself from breaking his father's commands? What will happen when these two very different people make their stand? Will these imposed restraints break them, or set them free?
Chapter 1 Collision of Fates
"Hey Karen, how are you doing?"
"Hi Marcy, I'm all right. Is everything set?"
"Yes, it's all set. We're just waiting for you to show up!"
"Okay, I'm on my way. There's no traffic...It just finished raining, so I'm not driving too fast. I can see from my navigation app that I'll be there in under twenty minutes."
"Okay. Great! We're all waiting for you."
Karen hung up using the button on her car's dashboard, as she continued to drive to the gallery opening.
It was her third opening for the year and the last two had been very successful. For this one, she just had to check the final placements and positions of the artworks, confirm that the arrangements were how she needed them to be, and, with any luck, the gallery would sell more paintings this time.
She was running late and she checked the clock on her phone clipped beside the steering wheel, navigation running, showing her the time to her destination.
As she turned the corner, taking a sharp bend, she was startled by a car coming from the opposite direction.
It was a large vehicle, driving at full speed, way too fast for a bend, with headlights on full blast.
She slowed down, but the car suddenly came at her, swerving into her own lane.
Desperate to avoid the oncoming vehicle, Karen turned the wheel sharply to the left. The oncoming driver also swerved, but in the panic of the situation, made a wrong decision and swerved to the right, causing a direct impact.
Karen's smaller sedan could not take the impact from the larger GMC truck and was thrown across the road, tumbling three times before landing upright on its wheels and spinning to a grinding halt.
Karen was knocked unconscious, pressed between the dislodged back seat and the airbag from the steering wheel, covered in blood and broken glass.
The driver's side door of the silver GMC truck opened slowly and the driver stumbled out.
One headlight of the truck was broken and the other was still on, in full force, illuminating Karen's unconscious body and her mangled navy-blue sedan.
Blood dripped from Karen's head and her right arm; her arm appeared to be terribly broken. The driver from the GMC truck, approached Karen's vehicle, fumbling in his pockets for his phone as he wiped a trail of blood from his forehead.
His eyes were unfocused, his body stumbling, swaying from side to side from the impact and the shock of the accident, as he tried to get to the driver of the sedan.
Through the shattered windshield, he saw a mass of tangled brown hair matted with blood, and he tried to walk faster.
There was a lot of blood on the car, the driver, and the road.
The man approached the wrecked sedan, desperately trying to hurry but unable to do so. The pain from the accident ripped through his body, slowing him down. He worked frantically to pull out his phone as he moved forward.
The tall, square-jawed man, finally extracted his device from his pocket and immediately dialed the emergency number, his blue eyes squinting from pain. He knew something was broken but he didn't know what or where. His only thought was to get to the slender woman covered in blood and broken glass.
The road was still damp from the rain that had fallen earlier that evening and the weather was cool, but the man was sweating profusely, his heart beating rapidly, gasping to catch his breath.
As soon as he reached the driver's side of the sedan, he placed the index and middle fingers of his left hand on her neck to check for a pulse, calming his nerves and holding his breath as he did so.
Her skin was cold to the touch at first, and he felt a crazed panic rising within him. He pulled his hand away, took a deep shaky breath, and tried again.
As he waited to feel her heartbeat, his heart sinking with every passing moment, he suddenly felt it and sighed with relief, there it is, he thought, his heart skipping a beat, she's not dead! Thank God, she's not dead!
He stumbled away from the near-crumpled vehicle and sat on the roadside, waiting for the ambulance to arrive, his right arm cradled in his left, rocking back and forth, biting on the nail of his left thumb.
The emergency room was bright and rowdy, several injured people were on benches and gurneys. Karen was surrounded by two doctors and three nurses, and the man who collided with her sedan was being attended to at a nurse's station.
"Her vitals are fading, we need to get her into an operating room, stat!" yelled one of the doctors in the team working on Karen.
"Yes doctor," a nurse responded, hurrying off to the intercom to book a room for an emergency operation.
The man, much calmer now, looked around at all the patients and then his attention rested on Karen on the gurney. He remembered the moment of impact and shook his head, turning away.
"We have one," the nurse who made the call for the operating room said as she rushed back to the team on Karen.
"Let's move," the doctor said as they all rushed Karen out of the emergency room and to the operating room.
The man stood to follow, but the nurse working on him held him back, "They are going in for surgery, I'll let you know where the room is. For now, hold on while I have a doctor look at this arm," she said in a gentle, matronly voice. He sat back down with a nod and shortly after, a doctor came over to look at his injured left arm.
The wound on his head had since stopped bleeding. It was a surface wound and not too serious.
The paramedics on arrival at the scene, had already commented to him that he was lucky to get away from such an accident with so few injuries.
As the doctor worked on his arm, the man reflected on what he had heard the doctors say when they were looking Karen over.
From what he had gathered, she had a deep cut on her forehead, her right arm was in danger of being amputated, and several ribs had been broken. There was internal bleeding and one of her legs had been broken in three places.
What am I going to do?
What is my father going to do? The man thought in despair.
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