Page 64 of In Doubt

His words are like praise and they warm my belly, filling me up like a good meal. I could get fat on words like that.

He slides down into the pit and steps into the beams of light.

“Better?” he asks, his eyes locked on mine.

“Better,” I tell him, managing a smile.

Then we set back to our work.

After an hour, the texture of the ground I’m scraping away alters. No longer soft and crumbling. Now hard and solid. I pause, running my fingertips across it. It’s different. Coarse. I gasp, my pulse suddenly pounding in my throat.

“Jake?” I croak.

“Huh?”

“Jake. I think I …”

He’s crouching beside me in the next moment, his warm body close to mine and alive with excitement.

“Have you found something, Giorgie?”

“I don’t know, maybe, sort of. I could be imagining it.”

“What is it?”

“Touch the ground,” I say and he reaches down to rest his fingertips next to mine. “It’s different, right? Coarser, harder, as if it could be–”

“A path!”

I grin up at him. “Do you think so?”

“Yes, Giorgie! Yes this could be it.”

I clap my hands together in excitement, my smile pulling wide across my face. “You reallyreallythink so?”

“Yes, Giorgie,” he chuckles. “I do.” He falls back onto his backside and reflects back my wide smile. “I knew you were right.”

“I am. I mean it isn’t enough to prove anything yet.” I tug out my phone and snap a few pictures of the compacted earth I’ve exposed. Jake watches me, that damn smile of his still playing across his face. My stomach spins madly and I have that crazy urge to fling my arms around him and kiss him again. “We need to find more.”

“We do.” He picks up my notebook and offers it to me. “We’d better get back to work then.”

I grin. “Yes, we had.”

My heart bounces around in my chest as I continue to dig, finding tiny bits more of what could be the path that connected the alpha and omega temples. Jake comes to work beside me and the scrape of his tool against the ground is strangely comforting. I’m so excited, I can’t help but chatter on to him about my theory.

He listens, nodding, and offering his own opinions, occasionally a justified challenge to my ideas.

Finally I run out of steam and we work silently. Only it’s not oppressive anymore. My mind doesn’t wander to those dark places. It’s occupied with the here and now.

After another half an hour, I hear his tool halt.

“Giorgie?” he says, and I twist around to peer his way, wondering if he’s found something else. “What you told me earlier… back at the villa …”

“Oh.” Nausea bubbles up from my stomach. I hadn’t meant to tell him. Nobody apart from my family and Sia knows. But it had slipped out before I’d even realised I was uttering the words.

I don’t want Jake Grantham to know the truth. It seems as if I’m finally winning his good opinion and I don’t want to lose it so soon. He’d consider me a fool.

And I was, wasn’t I?