Page 75 of Chasing the Sun

She made a soft sound, her fingers tightening on my shirt. “Mm-hmm.”

She sighed, losing the battle for sleep. “I need to figure it out. For her.”

“What?” I frowned, looking down, unsure what she was talking about. “For who?”

Her lashes fluttered. “The Lady.”

Before I could ask what she meant, she was already lost to sleep, her fingers still curled in my shirt. I had a dozen more questions but instead of asking, I held her and let myself pretend, for just one night, that I wouldn’t have to let her go.

Elodie stayed curled into me, warm and soft, unguarded in a way that made something tighten in my chest. I wanted to believe this was real, but I knew better than to hold on to things that weren’t meant for me.

TWENTY-TWO

ELODIE

With a groan,I awoke to the sound of a woodpecker hammering outside my window. Only it wasn’t outside; it was much, much closer—the hammering was coming from inside my skull.

I cracked one eye open, only to immediately regret it. The bedroom was too bright, the air too still. My tongue felt like sandpaper, my stomach a fragile, treacherous thing, as if one wrong move would send me over the edge.

I groaned, pressing my palms against my face. “I am never drinking again.”

The silence in the cottage expanded.

“Okay, maybe that’s a lie, but I am never drinkingthat muchagain.”

A wave of nausea rippled over me as I squeezed my eyes tight. My mouth was still dry and sticky and tasted faintly of tequila and a reckless night. Stark morning sunlight filtered through the gauzy white curtains in my bedroom.

Normally, waking to the warm sun on my face had me stretching my toes, yearning to bake in the warm light, but today that was not the case.

I was cold, but sticky. My dry lips smacked together.

Why did I think that bingo and three too many shots of tequila were a good idea?

I assumed drowning my sorrows over the burned-out shell of the barn was a good idea, but I had failed to remember how brutal a tequila hangover could be.

I planted my face into the pillow, breathing slowly and willing the contents of my empty stomach to stay down. I sucked in a long, slow breath.

Warm cedar. Musk.Him.

My breath hitched.

The scent wasn’t just in my pillow—it was clinging to me, woven into the very fibers of my sheets like he had been here, wrapped around me, real and solid and impossible to forget.

A hazy flash of memory surfaced—strong arms lifting me, the solid press of muscle against my side, warmth cocooning me in the dark.

My stomach flipped.

Hazy images of the line between Cal’s dark eyebrows deepening flashed in my mind. I filtered through my foggy memory of the night before.

Cal showing up to the Lantern, dusty and looking fine as hell after his softball game. The way those baseball pants clung to his ass was downright criminal. It had taken effort to pretend I hadn’t noticed the way his biceps peeked out from under the hem of his shirtsleeves.

More so, it was a concerted effort to not constantly look in his direction, but all night I could feel his attention on me. After Kit was done working her magic behind the bar, we had really doubled down on our night out, and somewhere after the third or fourth shot of Electric Cooter, things started getting fuzzy.

Kit grabbing me and kissing me right on the mouth as she laughed and said goodbye.

Stumbling out of the Lantern with two new friends in tow, feeling like I was too damn hot in the outfit I had picked out—the one I had chosen with the sole purpose of driving Cal Blackwood up a wall, if by chance I ran into him.

But who was I kidding? Of course I was going to run into him. The postgame beers at the Lantern had always been a tradition for the Star Harbor Phantoms.