AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Make sure to sign up for Sophie’s mailing list here! You’ll receive updates when new books come out and be the first to know when something goes on sale!
Readers!
If you enjoyed this book, will you do me a favor? Reviews are one of the best ways you can let authors know what you loved – or hated – about a book. Would you consider leaving me a review? Thank you!!!
The Wolf’s Darling
Want more shifters? I have a series out called The Wolfe City Pack. Check out an excerpt from book one: The Wolf’s Darling! You can also visit your favorite online retailer to get your copy!
Chapter 1
Amy
The rattling sound my engine is making can’t be good, but I ignore it. I’m excellent at ignoring problems. If you ignore something long enough, it goes away. Isn’t that right? Yeah, I think that’s right. I ignore the sound and keep on driving, keep on moving. It’s not something that I can do anything about right now, so I’ll just keep going.
That’s what you do when you’re having trouble.
You don’t quit. You don’t give up. You don’t stop. You just move. You have to move or you’ll die. You have to move or everything will fall apart. You have to move or nothing will make sense anymore. You have to move.
Tears slide down my face as I try to focus on the road. I shouldn’t be running away from my problems, but I am. I totally am. I know that, and I know it’s a bad idea, but I’m doing it anyway because I’m nothing but a big, fat coward who can’t tough it out when things get hard.
I’m nothing but a loser.
A failure.
A huge disappointment.
I put on one of my favorite songs from my angst-driven teenage years. Down by Something Corporate starts blaring through the speakers and I lose myself in the tunes for just a little bit. For just a little while, I lose myself in the song. I lose myself in the music. For just a little while, I forget what I’m running away from and think about what I’m running toward.
Freedom.
Hope.
Something new.
I peek at the GPS on my phone to see how much further I have to go. It’s just another hour to Honeypot, Colorado. My cousin Hope is graciously allowing me to stay with her and her family for a little while until I get back on my feet, until I figure out what I’m going to do with my life. She knows what it’s like to lose everything and have to start over.
She knows what it’s like to have nothing but yourself and your car and a couple of boxes of junk from your childhood.
I think about the fact that I reached out to Hope when my world fell apart and I think about what she said.
“Just come to Honeypot,” she told me. “Everything is different here. You’ll see. You need a fresh start, Amy. You need something new.”
Maybe it will be a fresh start. Maybe it will be exactly what I need, exactly what I hope for. Maybe it will give me everything I long for, but I doubt it. A city is a city and a town is a town. They’re all the same, in the end. Everyone is looking out for number one, and heaven help the person who gets in their way.
Nobody has time for other people.
Nobody has time to go out of their way and help.
Nobody has time for patience.
Nobody has time to forgive.
I start crying again as I drive. I wipe my eyes because it’s getting hard to see out the front window, but then I realize that’s not because of my tears. It’s because the engine has now started to smoke.
As the clouds billow from the front of the car, my heart sinks. This is it, then. This is the end of my wonderful, grand adventure. This is the part of my story where everything stops, where the heroine realizes she never really had a chance. The whole world was against her. What was she going to do?
Fight it?
