A Knight Comes To Bed by Sweet and Special Books

 
    Chapter One
    RACHEL GILROY WAS your quintessential, all-American college girl—dark hair, blue eyes and peppy attitude. Fresh out of high school and bright eyed, she'd gone straight to college to earn her degree. The University represented a lot more than just a diploma, for Rachel, it was an opportunity to make her parents proud.
    Rachel didn’t have it easy like the other kids in her university. Her father had been a farmer until his untimely demise in a hit-and-run accident out on the dusty farm roads. While insurance money and a decent bid to buy the farm from a friend kept them out of the streets, her mother had worked for years as a seamstress to make ends meet in the absence of the her father’s income.
    Rachel never once forgot about the life she and her mother had to go through. She had been young when her father passed, all of twelve years of age, and it had been hard for her to understand why no one had been held accountable. It had been difficult for her to understand any of it.
    One day she had had a father, a big man with hands rough with callouses from throwing hay bails into the backs of pick-ups, and the next day she didn't. Try as she might, Rachel couldn't remember much of the last day she'd had her father in her life. It had all been a blur to her. She couldn't even remember if she'd said she loved him, or if he kissed her on the cheek.
    It had been a stormy spring morning, the kind that farmers in the Midwest depend on to water their crops, when he'd got in his pick up to head into town for something her mother had asked for. Rachel had gotten on the school bus without any thought to whether she would still see her father when she got home. Her mind was instead occupied with thoughts whether she would be able to go outside for recess or if recess would be moved into the gym because of the storm.
    That afternoon, the principal came into the gym and quietly spoke with the teacher with such a solemn face that all of the children knew something had gone wrong. There had been some kind of terrible accident. Each child hoped deep in their heart that the bad news wasn't for them. That the angel of death had passed over their families that day. They wondered if maybe there had been a tornado that had ran over someone's farm house and taken up not just planks of timber and nails but screaming loved ones.
    Rachel had been just like the others and hoped more than anything the news wouldn't be for her, but when the principal motioned her over and walked with her to his office with his arm around her shoulder, Rachel knew there was no escaping it.
    When she found out that her father wouldn't be coming home from work that night or ever, she burst into tears and had been inconsolable. She was sent home right away to her mother where they both mourned deeply for days. Things had never been the same for her and her mother, but they still had each other to depend on.
    It wasn't until years later, long after her tears and dried, that she came to understand that the man who had killed her daddy in a car accident had been drunk, but allowed to walk free because he was the governor’s son.
    Rachel had gone to college not just to educate herself and help ensure a better future than her parents had, but also because she wanted to make a difference. She wanted to be able to help stop the kind of injustice that had happened to her from ever happening to anyone else.
    But she knew that in order to do that, she'd have to be able to be powerful. Rachel took the application process to college seriously. She buried herself in books during freshman year, and never once forgot what she came to college for. And now, she was now putting a great deal of effort into studying for her sophomore year midterms.
Chapter Two
    THE SMALL ROOM she shared with three other people smelled of old carpet and musty air ducts, and was no place to seriously study for the midterms. Rachel never felt that she was able to focus much in her apartment, so