Page 74 of Wish You Were Her

Jonah blinked. “I don’t actually know. We don’t exchange super personal details.”

Allegra pretended to gape at him. “Jonah!”

“What?”

“She could be ancient. She could be old enough to be your great-grandmother.”

Jonah’s eyes widened a little but he shook his head, clearly dislodging any doubt. “She’s not old! She sounds my age. I think.”

“But you’re a bit of an old man, Thorne.”

There was a pause.

“How old did she sound over the phone?” he asked innocently.

Allegra smothered a smirk. “Not sure. She sounded stressed. But if she has a hotshot job in social media, she must be well out of school.”

You’re evil, a voice in her head whispered. But another reminded her that she needed him to know exactly who it was he claimed to like. Not a goddess on the screen, not a savior in an email.

A human.

Their eyes locked and she felt the full force of the electricity he always invoked. Palpable and overpowering, but she was no longer able to bury it beneath an argumentative tone or a squabble.

“Allegra,” Jonah spoke roughly, his voice deeper than before. “I can’t stop thinking about you.”

Allegra was held back by eighteen years of saying the wrongthing. She didn’t have a script with stage directions in front of her. She had no way of knowing how the scene would go, how the other person would respond. It wasn’t blocked or written down or rehearsed. It was live and unpredictable. And she was scared.

“You said you were lonely,” he said, too quietly for any of the others to hear. “I know you’re here for a summer. I know you’ll be gone soon. Everything will turn back to pumpkins for me. But, in the meantime, I want to… I want…”

She watched him fight with how to word it. “Yes?”

“I want you.”

She watched his pupils dilate as he looked at her. “Lots of people have wanted me, Jonah. They don’t want it anymore, once they’ve come too close.”

He shook his head, moving closer. “I’m not like that.”

“No one thinks they’re like that, until the shiny thing in their head turns out to be a human. Just like everybody else.”

He was about to respond when Jasper appeared in the entryway, wearing a knowing smile. “I can drive you back into town. Or you can stay here. We’ve got three spare rooms.”

“I get Christine’s old room!” shouted Grace from the kitchen.

“Who’s Christine?” Allegra asked.

“Jasper’s sister,” Jonah murmured. “Don’t ask, it’s impossible to explain her.”

“How about it?” Jasper asked Allegra, every inch the hostess. “I can make you all some amazing eggs in the morning?”

Allegra liked her so much. There was something different about her. Something familiar. As if they had met in another life. She brought up feelings of déjà vu, despite Allegra knowing they had never interacted before.

“You can have the blue room upstairs, Allegra,” Jasper said.“It has the nicest en-suite.” She looked pointedly at Jonah. “You all right to sleep here on the sofa? No one’s allowed in my parents’ room, I’m afraid.”

Allegra grinned as he released a heavy sigh. “Sure.”

Jasper led Allegra up to the blue room.

“It’s the same size as my dad’s apartment,” Allegra said, laughing.