Rust & Starlight
Chapter 1: The Crash at Dawn
The Kansas sky was the color of a bad bruise — purple and gray and unforgiving. Wren Calloway had been awake since 4 a.m., as always. Her hands were cracked from the cold, her boots caked with mud from the chicken coop, and her heart… well, her heart had been a dead thing for three years now. Ever since the day they told her that Luke wasn’t coming home from Afghanistan.
She was mending a stretch of barbed wire fence along the north pasture when she heard it: the roar of an engine going way too fast on the old county road. She looked up just in time to see a beat-up 1970 Ford F-250, powder blue with rust on the wheel wells, swerve violently, clip the shoulder, and plow straight through her fence.
The crash was a symphony of shrieking metal, snapping posts, and the pathetic bleating of her sheep scattering in terror. The truck came to rest upside down in a ditch, steam hissing from its ruined radiator like a dying breath.
“Damn it all to hell,” Wren muttered, grabbing her fence pliers like a weapon and running toward the wreck.
The driver’s door was crumpled, but she could see movement inside. A man’s hand, tattooed with music notes, pushed against the shattered window. She dropped to her knees, yanked the door handle, and with a strength she didn’t know she still had, wrenched it open.
Out tumbled Mason Cross.
She knew his face. Everyone knew his face. Or rather, everyone had known it, five years ago, when he was the biggest thing in country music. Ten Grammys. Sold-out arenas. A marriage to America’s sweetheart. Then came the drinking, the DUI, the very public divorce, and the spectacular flameout that landed his face on tabloids under headlines like “Nashville’s Golden Boy Goes to Rust.”
Now he was in her ditch, bleeding from a cut on his forehead, smelling like whiskey and regret, and blinking up at her with eyes the color of a stormy sea.
“You’re not an angel,” he slurred. “Angels don’t look that pissed off.”
Wren straightened up, planting her hands on her hips. The morning light caught the silver streaks in her auburn hair and the fierce set of her jaw.
“No,” she said coldly. “I’m the woman who’s going to make you fix every inch of this fence. With your own two hands. And then I’m going to sue you for every dollar you have left.”
Mason laughed — a broken, hollow sound — and then passed out.