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“Yup, good to go.” She smiled at her mom. “I’ll just, you know… I’ll see him by myself. If that’s okay.”
“Sure thing. I’m right here if you need me. And your running shoes are over there.”
As Bitty put on her Brooks, she ducked her head—so her big, giant, tomato-red blush didn’t put her mom under a damn heat lamp—and then she tried to not look like she was straightening all her clothes, down to her frickin’ knickers.
“I won’t be long,” she said.
“I’ll wait here—you two take your time.”
Bitty hesitated.
“You don’t have to be embarrassed,” came the gentle reassurance. “And you don’t have to explain anything. You’re an adult now and you’re allowed your privacy.”
“So you aren’t going to tell… Father?”
Mary covered her heart. “Girls unite. I won’t say a thing.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
Technically, there wasn’t anything to tell, she reminded herself. L.W. had given her a coat, not an engagement ring. Still, it all felt live-wire fresh, fraught with peril, super exciting. And there was something about sharing a romance with her mother that seemed natural, but admitting it to her father felt…
Well, she just got a case of the sheeps about that kind of conversation.
Pulling a pivot, she tried to be calm about the whole walking out to the front entry. When she came to the door, she hesitated before she opened it, her hand gripping the copper latch and staying put, her breath getting tight in her lungs, that flutter thing turning her heart into a strobe light in the center of her chest.
It was like leaping into a lake on a hot summer night. At some point, you just had to leave the dock planks and fly.
Or you were never going to know the joy of the plunge.
Closing her eyes to make the leap, Bitty yanked open the door,and the way the cold air hit her made her gasp. And then she was extending her running shoe over the threshold, and thinking of the Resolve2Evolve tagline:Be Alive, Do More, Be More.
Boy, had that message been received, and she did feel more alive, and she was going to be more, with L.W.—and oh, God, she just wanted to feel that warmth again. Not from his jacket, though.
From his body—
All the way down at the end of the walkway, standing in the snow by the lantern, the male who was waiting for her turned around and looked up to the porch.
Not black hair, braided down the top of the skull. No harsh brows and stark looks. No tattooed neck or black diamond earrings.
Blond hair. Brilliant, Bahamas-blue eyes. And a worried, hesitant expression.
“There she is,” Rhage said tenderly. “My girl.”
The disappointment was… crushing. And to cover it up, from her father, from herself, Bitty rushed forward, skipping down the little set of stairs and racing down the shoveled walk. Before she was really in range, she leapt into the air, throwing herself forward, knowing that she would be caught and held, captured by her father and kept safe from gravity’s pull and the hard, unforgiving ground.
Rhage did not let her down. He never did.
Those big, strong arms were as they always had been, lifting her up, but holding her carefully, too. And as she looked over his huge shoulder, she pretended that she wasn’t searching the lawn for another male.
A different one.
CHAPTER THIRTY
As dawn arrived and bathed Caldwell in the kind of light that grew and nourished so many living things—but was a straight-up death sentence to a vampire—Wrath transported himself off the planet entirely. Good thing his body didn’t need to leave home to do it. His consciousness—or maybe it was his soul, he didn’t know—went up, up, and away, to a place far from the ground, and yet not in the clouds, either.
Not in the conventional sense, at least.
And given that the Sanctuary didn’t really exist in a physical manner, he’d always wondered how he knew the second he was there. When he’d had his eyesight, that hadn’t been a thing, but now—he justknew. Even before he scented anything, before he felt the strange, bathwater-like air, before he sensed beneath his shitkickers the springy grass… he just knew he was no longer on Earth.
