Page 10 of Outlaw Heartstrings
I roll my eyes. Looks like Alba’s still the same goodie two shoes I remember.
“Fine. You take a seat here on the porch, and I’ll go grab a first aid kit. I’ll be right back,” I tell her, trying to come up with a compromise that she’ll agree to.
After a brief pause, Alba nods. “Okay.”
I bolt inside, scrambling around the large house and quickly finding a kit in the nearest bathroom. I flip it open as I head back to the front door, grateful to find a set of bandages and some ointment inside.
“We hit the jackpot!” I announce, stepping back outside. But when I get to the porch, she’s not here. “Alba?” My eyes scan the yard.
Nothing. She’s nowhere in sight.
In the distance, I catch the sound of a car engine speeding away.
“What the fuck?”
Alba Anderson is long gone, disappearing as quickly—and strangely—as she arrived.
But I’m not worried. I’ve got the whole summer to track her down. She won’t get away from me. Not until she tells me what the hell is going on.
5
ALBA
My heart is still clattering against my chest when I make it home.
So much for thinking a peaceful drive through the hills would calm me down. My skin is no longer crawling because of my pervy boss. But now I’m all out of sorts for a very different reason.
Easton Raines is back.
He could have been healing up on a balmy tropical beach somewhere with a piña colada. Instead, he decided to come back to Fairy Bush and turn my world upside down.
I spent years bracing myself, expecting him to turn up here eventually. For a visit after his first pro hockey season ended. For a summer getaway to escape the city life. For a day or two over the Christmas holidays.
But one year went by with no Easton. And then another. After this much time without a homecoming, I’d assumed he’d put Fairy Bush behind him. I’d accepted the reality of never seeing his face again—except through a television screen.
But now, he’s here.
There’s the loud, roaring engine of a moped tearing down my street. Then the frantic rattle of my creaky staircase as biker boots thunder up to my second floor apartment.
“Hun? Where are you?”
My best friend barrels through my front door only a minute after I walk through it. I texted Julissa with our 9-1-1 code on my way home, desperate for her to help me make sense of this.
“In here, Jules.”
She appears in the doorway, tall and lanky with her sleek, black chin-length haircut.
LIFE IS BETTER WITHOUT A BRA, the bold yellow letters on her black crop top announce. I let out a little snicker.
Point taken.
Then I’m sitting on the counter of the small, old-fashioned bathroom while she helps clean and bandage the broken skin on my knee.
By the time I hightailed it off Easton’s property, blood was running all the way down my leg. But now that Jules has doctored me up, the cut doesn’t look so bad.
“It might scar, though,” she tells me, a worried look on her face.
I laugh darkly. “Oh no, and then our boss won’t want to ogle me anymore?”
