Scarred: Hudson & Callie by Lucy Rinaldi

Callie: I’ve been a good person all my life. If anyone ever needed me I was there. Just as I was there for my best friend Emilee. I was there the day she was attacked, I saved her life, and the life of her young son. Did I honestly believe the monster who did it would break out of prison and come looking for us? No.
But that’s exactly what happened. He escaped and I again saved Emilee’s life, along with the lives of my two younger sisters. I let him take his revenge out on me. That man did vile, sick, unimaginable things to me, and God knows how I survived it. But I did survive, and now I’m one mass of scars and memories I cannot forget.
I’m trying to put my life back together, I’m getting there slowly, even if I do have to hide my face from everyone in town. There’s one person who won’t let me hide, though. One man I never thought I’d see again after he walked away from me three weeks before our wedding five years ago. Hudson Ryker. The love of my life still to this day, but if he thinks I’m going to make it easy for him, he’s very much mistaken.

Hudson: When I walked away from Callie Harper five years ago, I did so for selfish reasons. I loved her, god I loved her fiercely. But my mother’s death affected me in ways I never imagined it could. I needed to get out. It took me five long years to move forward. Like the cocky SOB I am, I thought I could come home to Oak Springs and Callie Harper would just fall into my arms like I’d never been away.
What I didn’t expect was to come home and find a shadow of a woman living a half-life, too scared to let anyone see the woman she is now. There is nothing I won’t do to prove to Callie that I’m back for good, that I still love her as much as I ever did. And I will make her see that she has no reason to hide. Scars are just scars, we wear them, they do not wear us.