Page 28 of The Darkest Chase

It’s cold for April. The night breeze seeps under the collar of my light jacket and gives me goosebumps everywhere.

The chill. That’s all it is.

Not me wondering what Micah Ainsley really wants with me.

Something to do with the job for Xavier Arrendell, I guess. Which makes me as uneasy as Xavier himself, and considering Officer Ainsley is a cop…

I wonder if it’s something dangerous.

Something I should run away from before I even find out what it is.

Yet somehow, I can’t.

I can’t help wanting to see him and find out anyway.

I can’t miss a chance to be brave when I grew up afraid of my own shadow.

It’s definitely a challenge, considering who I’m meeting with.

Micah Ainsley, with those cold quicksilver eyes and that moonstone skin. Deadly, sharp, and honed.

And soon, all alone with me.

Just a strange, gorgeous man and a thousand wild thoughts I shouldn’t have.

Nothing spicy will happen, of course.

Officer Ainsley is an ordinary cop and he honestly seems like a bit of a hardass.

I’m a grown woman who definitely shouldn’t be having fantasies fit for a high school diary.

I wonder if that’s one of the ways I’ve never quite grown up, though.

Because I stayed inside, cooped up with my illness, I never made many friends. I never had the young, dumb experiences other kids did.

So did I really grow up at all?

Sighing, I crane my head back, gazing up at the clear night sky. The Milky Way glows overhead, the yawning universe with its necklace of stars framed by tall trees.

It’s like an eye opening up to let me look inside its jeweled colors. Breathtakingly beautiful, but a little lonely, too.

I just don’t know what I’m pining for.

A life I never had?

Some days, I feel like I only live for work.

It’s not that I don’t love what I do.

I live for feeling smoothly sanded wood under my fingers, the awl in my hands, the scent of sawdust. Grandpa’s workshop was where I first started to learn to control my breathing, so I could savor that scent without the dust triggering an attack.

So I could be with him, caught up in his warm approval as he taught me how to shape wood, how to etch, how to engrave, how to know the difference between carved designs and burned, and so much more.

For a child shut-in who spent half her free days at the doctor, he gave me a life.

Grandpa’s workshop was pure magic.

He was a sorcerer and I was his happy apprentice.