Impulse Read Online Free Page B

sound of that, she parked beside the lake, then carried her white figure skates to a wide, flat boulder on the bank. She brushed the snow off with a white- gloved hand and sat down to lace up the skates.
    Erin could not remember a life before skating. Her mother, a national-champion skater injured before the Sarajevo Olympics, had been forced to watch from a hospital bed as East Germany’s Katarina Witt took home the gold medal.
    Forced into retirement at the ripe old age of sixteen, Susan began planning the future. Not her own, which had shattered along with her knee when she’d landed that double axel so disastrously, but that of the child she intended to have. The child she’d groom into a champion.
    Which was how Erin had ended up on double-bladed strap-on skates, being pulled around the rink by her mother before she could walk.
    By five years old, she was taking lessons six days a week. Skating all seven. Perhaps God may have taken a day off to rest, but God hadn’t had a mother determined to win Olympic gold.
    She’d won her first competition a week before her seventh birthday and, at age ten, training twenty hours a week, became the youngest girl ever to compete in the senior ladies’ level at the U.S. Nationals. That was the year her parents got divorced and her mother took her to Park City, Utah, to be trained by a former Russian figures coach at a skating center he’d established in the Rockies.
    It was at thirteen when her fear of food set in as she struggled with the failure to control her body. A failure she carried in her budding breasts, the faintest curving of thigh.
    By sixteen, her periods stopped, she’d given up her virginity to her coach, begun living on laxatives, and discovered she could ease the never-ending stress, just a bit, by cutting her arms with razor blades.
    Blinded by their own agendas, both her coach—who had, by then, begun using sex to control her, dishing it out as a reward for a good practice and withholding it as punishment for a less than stellar performance—and her mother, who had visions of high-paying commercial endorsements dancing in her head, refused to see that the teenager who’d never known a childhood was racing full tilt toward burnout.
    It was on the eve of the World finals, after a disastrous practice, when all the medals, newspaper clip pings, and national rankings couldn’t overcome Erin’s own certainty that she’d never be able to live up to what so many people expected of her. That was the night she took a pair of scissors her trainer used to cut athletic tape and stabbed herself in her wrist’s vein.
    Later, in the ER, Susan Gallagher demanded the doctor clear her daughter to skate the next morning.
    Reading the shock and distaste on the doctor’s face, at that moment Erin realized that if she really wanted a life—and she did—she’d have to create one on her own.
    She walked out of the hospital, packed her bag, leaving all her beaded and spangled designer costumes behind, and never looked back.
    She wasn’t quite sure what she was going to do, but she tackled this new challenge the same way she’d always approached her skating: by putting her entire heart and all her energy into it.
    And it was paying off. Unlike the other girls who weighed themselves constantly, vigilant about falling prey to the dreaded “Freshman Fifteen,” Erin not only accepted, she welcomed, every new ounce. Especially when she realized that her new curves attracted boys.
    And speaking of boys…
    She felt, rather than saw, his gaze. So, he’d come, after all. It was odd that she hadn’t heard his truck. And it wasn’t in the lot. He must have parked it back in the trees, wanting to surprise her.
    She stood up, as comfortable on the slender steel blades as a girl who’d grown up on a tropical island would be barefoot.
    The air was so dry and so cold, Erin could practically feel the ice crystals forming in her lungs.
    Okay. If he wanted to watch from the shadows,