Love Me Long (Love Me Book 4)

Chapter 1

Chloe Lockwood sat on her balcony overlooking the square below. It was late, and she should be packing since she had an early morning flight, but she wanted to enjoy the massive 4th of July fireworks display she could see over the treetops. Savannah had one on the river every year, and one of the benefits of living downtown was that she could watch it without leaving home.

There was a special place in her heart for her hometown. She had been raised in Savannah, had left Savannah to find adventure and travel the world at a young age, and returned to Savannah heartbroken to start over. She had carved out a life here with a productive career as an Emergency Room nurse, and she had made great friends, such as Lia and Faye. Chloe couldn't have wished for better friends, but it was different now that they had met their loves and gotten married.

Typically, she would have had her friends over to celebrate the holiday. However, she was leaving the following day, and she wanted to prepare for the journey that lay ahead of her mentally, so she decided to spend the evening alone.

Chloe had felt her wanderlust returning over the last few years as she watched her friends find their happiness. She felt the need to go out into the world and figure out who she was and what she wanted for her future. The past decade had been spent in a sort of limbo as she waited for something that she had just recently concluded was never going to happen.

Her choice had been to take six months off from work and join a small non-profit group that sent medical teams into countries that needed aid. Knowing what she wanted, which was to see her father again, Chloe had requested to be sent to the small country of Drevniye.

Chloe had left the small country of Drevniye, located between Russia and Finland, almost twelve years earlier when the civil war had started. She had begged to stay, but those closest to her had sent her away for her safety. With nowhere else to go, having left her only family, her father, behind, she had decided to return to the city where she had been raised.

As the years passed, her only goal had been to find a way to return to Drevniye and to those she loved. Chloe's father was a doctor and was well known throughout the small country. One of the reasons he had stayed and had managed to remain safe was that he was close friends with the ruler of the autocracy, Valentine Juric. Valentine had trained with her father to be a doctor, and Chloe had fallen madly in love with him at fifteen. It had taken her four years to grow up enough for him to see her as a woman and fall in love with her. Valentine had been her first and only love. There had been no other, and there never would be.

She had promised him she would wait, and she had waited for him for over eleven years, and during those years, he had never given her any sign to hope that they would be together again. She had tried to force the situation many times, but Valentine had always stood firm and been indifferent at best. Chloe had believed that it was to keep her safe, but now she wasn't so sure.

Letting her thoughts wander to Valentine Jurick was something she had done her best to fight over the last year, but now she let her mind have full rein as she remembered the past.

Valentine had been thrust into power when he was the only one left in his family to take it. He had no wish to be a ruler, but when his older brother and father died fighting his uncle, he was forced to step in as leader of the country.

Valentine's dream had been to heal people, and when he had taken over Drevniye, his dream had changed to creating a democratic republic for his country. In order to create a democratic republic, he had to end his uncle's attempt for control, and with the change from healer to warrior, a little bit of his soul had died. 

Chloe knew this because she had watched it die.

When Chloe had left him and her father behind, she believed that it would only take a year or two for Valentine to win the war, and then she could return, and they could be together once more, but that hadn't happened.

What had happened instead had been reported in an international newspaper. A news article recently talked about Valentine's bid to secure the country by having an heir with a beautiful Russian socialite. Now that the war was over and the country was healing, all of the promises Valentine had made to Chloe were false. He had no intention of coming for her and renewing their love affair.

What Chloe didn't understand was why? Why did he need an heir if he was creating a democratic republic? And if things were finally safe enough for him to marry, why didn't Valentine come for her or send word that he wanted her to go to him. The only conclusion that she could draw from his action, or rather inaction, was that he had never really wanted her.

The article had left Chloe angry and mortified. She hadn't told anyone about her and Valentine's love affair until two years later, when there was a miscommunication between her and one of her friends, Faye. The incident had almost cost Faye the love of her life and Chloe two good friends.

Faye had fallen in love with one of Valentine's best friends, Silas DeGraff. Silas had come to Savannah at Chloe's father's insistence to write a book on emergency medicine. One of the contributors to the book was Valentine. One of the few times that Chloe had tried to force a reconnect with Valentine was convincing Silas to let her help with the book by taking notes at his online meetings with Valentine.

Silas had left her alone with the computer and Valentine every night after they had finished working, but Valentine had only said a quick good evening and ended the call.

Chloe had been too embarrassed to tell Silas what was going on, and Valentine must have kept it to himself because it repeatedly happened, night after night. A few months later, another uprising had started, and she and Silas had to do a lot of backtracking to make sure there was no connection between Chloe and Valentine, even going so far as to pretend that Chloe and Silas were dating.

Although Chloe had given up on seeing Valentine again, she hadn't given up on seeing her father. There was no way in hell she was going to let Valentine keep her away from him as he had the last twelve years. She was done following their instructions. She was going to do things her way, and what she needed was a plan to see her father and try to convince him to retire and come home with her. So she decided to use her training as a nurse to get her back to Drevniye.

The odd thing was that after she had made the choice, things had fallen into place rather easily. It took less than a month to sign up, be accepted, arrange for the time off and take care of all of the necessary arrangements to be gone for six months.

She knew it was going to be dangerous with plenty of hard work, but she was afraid of neither.

Her mind wandered back to Valentine and the love and hurt she felt.

As Chloe listened to the fireworks exploding around her on the evening before she began her journey back to Drevniye, she wondered what the future had in store for her. There was one thing of which she was sure, she and Valentine were never meant to be. Just as Valentine's dreams had been shattered twelve years earlier, so had hers, but she had been too stupid to realize it.

However, she could see her father again, and that was something she would do even if it killed her.