“I know, but you’ll have to reschedule it.”
“It’s not that simple. I’m not saying I won’t come home if you insist it’s important, but I’m saying, can’t I come right after my exam? I’ve been studying all year for it.”
She heard her mom sigh. “Your dad is picking up Clover from a school trip, or he would have come for you. I told him you’d get the first flight out tonight.”
She was handcuffed to what she could ask over the phone; it had been drummed into her from a young age to never give too much on open lines for fear of who might be tapped in.
“I won’t go anywhere. I’m already tucked up for the night, anyway. And tomorrow, I’ll go to the exam hall and head straight to the airport afterward.”
“Fine, but someone from the chapter there will be stationed outside, okay?”
“Yeah, that’s fine.” It was a relief to know that. “You’ll tell me everything when I get there?”
“As much as we can.” Her mom’s voice was tense. Though she’d made the hard decision to live out of state for college, Sunny was a home girl through and through.
The following morning, at precisely 7 a.m., she headed to the large hall across the quad. The Harley Davidson was parked across the street. She didn’t recognize the white-haired man in the familiar Souls cut, but she felt closer to him than she did to the hundreds of other students.
Sunny had to clear her mind to write the three-hour paper.
And when it was finally over, she dropped her pencil and sighed. It was time to head home. But the heavens had opened, and it was lashing with rain as she pushed the door open. Lightning bolts flew everywhere, as if Thor were mad at his wife.
She quickly pulled out her phone and switched to the airport app. The red banner on the top of the app made her heart sink. All flights out of Texas were currently grounded.
“Shit. Shit.”
In a cab, with a purring Harley Davidson following behind her, she headed to the airport, hoping that things would have improved by the time she arrived.
However, nothing had changed six hours later.
She was sitting in the waiting area, looking at the departure boards. Every flight, incoming and outgoing, was delayed.
“It’s okay, sweetheart,” her mom said. “We had a second plan organized. Someone is coming to you.”
It was Sunny’s mistake not to ask who.
She assumed someone from the Texas chapter would escort her home.
The last person she wanted to encounter emerged from the throng of stranded passengers, resembling an avenging demon intent on global conflict.
His muddy brown hair was wet from the rain, and his six-foot-two, wide-shouldered stature towered over most people. It should have been impossible to sense one person through a sea of people, but her body turned into a tuning fork, almost as if a vibration were rattling her bones, as her heart started a slow pitter-patter until the beats boomed in her ear canal.
He never stalled in his steps. People got out of his way. The man wore a black leather jacket, heavy biker boots, and a leather vest with rocker patches on the front, declaring him a Renegade Souls member.
The urge to run to him was strong, almost a natural-born compulsion, like a magnet wanting to meet its mate. But Sunny remained seated, snuffing out the feeling.
Time was such a fickle thing.
For as much as Sunny persuaded herself that her feelings for the man striding toward her no longer mattered, it was as if time stripped her of the distance and placed her right back at that moment where her heart beat only for her best friend, her soulmate, the other half of her.
Time didn’t heal.
Time hadn’t allowed her to move on.
Because her heart was racing as she swallowed, unable to draw her eyes away.
Not so long ago, there was a time when she would have jumped up from the seat and raced to meet him halfway with the speediest of steps. And then she would have jumped into his arms, declaring how good it was to see him and wanting to know every detail of his life since she’d last spoken to him.
But that was long past, and Sunny refused to throw away her heart on a careless robot like Sebastian Priest.
