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“I’ll be back soon, are they waiting up for me?” I asked, nearly running into someone getting onto the elevator. “Oh, sorr—”
“No, Thea convinced them to go to bed telling them that you are, in fact, a big girl who can handle yourself.” Brynn’s laugh was far away as I stared up at the person I’d just run into with the same shock I’d felt earlier outside of the club. “Ceer? Are you still there?”
“I gotta go,” I told her, my tongue suddenly feeling too thick for my mouth.
I hung up on her mid-sentence, my mouth opening and closing as I tried to find the words that had eluded me earlier.
“Ciara,” Leith said in a whoosh that, if I didn’t know better, sounded almost like relief. “I was hoping I’d run into you again.”
As I took in his face and the flare of his nostrils as he, undoubtedly, smelled Wiz all over my body, I came to a very solid conclusion:
I needed to get the fuck out of Scotland ASAP.
Chapter eight
Ciara looked as if she’d seen a ghost, her swollen pink lips and brown eyes opening wide as we stared at each other.
I’d been getting on the elevator to go and pack my things to bring back to our flat now that Team Scotland had been eliminated from the curling event, but as soon as the doors had opened my nose was filled with her all-too familiar cinnamon scent.
The doors started to close and I held a hand out to block them, my eyes raking over Ciara’s disheveled appearance and the scent of another alpha all over her.
A low growl left my chest before I could catch it and the noise seemed to shake Ciara out of whatever stupor she’d been in since I’d greeted her.
“Hello, Leith,” she said with a sigh as she edged past me and out of the elevator. “I feel like we keep running into each other.”
Her words were airy and detached, but I could hear the tightness in her voice as she put distance between us.
It had taken me almost a year to get over Ciara Callaghan after she left to go back to America to be with her family.
I’d called her countless times over that year, but she mostly only responded to texts and even then she’d put distance between us. It was like she’d rebuilt the walls that I’d worked so hard to break down over our three months together and I was now blocked out entirely.
An embarrassing sap of a man was what I turned into and I still winced when I thought of it now.
It had taken an intervention from Connor and the rest of the curling team to get my head back on straight. I deleted her number from my phone and washed my hands of the whole fucking thing.
Then I’d met Enzo and Artie a few months later and the rest was history—or so I thought.
Seeing her skate and then running into her outside of the club had thrown me. She was still just as gorgeous as she’d been four years ago, all long warm brown limbs and soft curves.
It was like a punch to the gut to see her and watch her run away from me again.
I’d told my pack everything about my past and they knew more about my time with Ciara than anyone else. Artie had told me to go after her, but I could feel Enzo’s disapproval through the bond and that had made me stay rooted in place as we watched her disappear back into the club.
Enzo was technically our pack leader. He made sure we were all safe and cared for. Not to mention that he’d been on the receiving end of a lot of my anxiety-ridden bullshit pertaining to Ciara and I was fairly sure his opinion of her wasn’t great.
So, like the eejit I was, I stayed and let her go.
But there must have been someone on my side somewhere in the universe because she stood in front of me now.
“Ciara, wait.” I reached for her hand only for her to yank it clean out of my reach.
“Why?” Ciara asked, crossing her arms over her chest. I wanted to bury my nose there and inhale her scent deep into my lungs, but I kept my spine straight, reminding myself that I was a bonded alpha and that sort of thing only flew with Artie’s permission.
“I just wanted to talk to you and get…” I tried to find the words. “I dunno closure or something.”
My words were stupid even to my own ears, and judging by Ciara’s snort of derision, they were to hers too.
“Closure? Why would you need closure? I’m not the one who blocked you. You blocked me.” Her words were like the lash of a whip, harsh enough to make me flinch as she shot them at me.
