Page 27 of Wild Weekend
Stella xx
It feels like someone’s punched me in the stomach. The air expels from my lungs, and I can’t breathe. I grab the note and read it again, not believing what I read.
She can’t be gone. It can’t end like this.
I race out of the motel room and along the walkway to Cleo’s room. A cleaning cart is parked outside, and the door is half open.
I push into the room and a woman in an apron looks up at me, startled.
“The people that were staying in this room, where are they?”
She shrugs. “They’re gone. Checked out ten minutes ago.
Ten minutes isn’t long when you’ve got kids and bags to organize. They might still be in the parking lot.
I race out of the room and down the stairs, bumping into a man as I go.
“Watch it!” he calls after me.
The parking lot’s full of people loading their bikes up. I head to the corner where the Underground Crows were parked.
But there’s no sign of Stella or any of them or the van that Cleo was driving with the kids.
I dart around the parking lot looking for Stella or Cleo or anyone they were with. But when ten o’clock rolls around and Luke finds me in a near empty parking lot, I have to face the truth.
It might have meant more to me, but to Stella it was just a fling.
I realized too late I have feelings for her, and now, Stella is gone.
11
WILL
Six months later…
Rain splatters the windows of the Wild Taste Bar and Restaurant, making it difficult to concentrate on the report in front of me.
I’ve taken to working in a corner table at HQ some days just in case Stella turns up looking for me.
“Give me five minutes and I could put you out of your misery.”
Bit Rate slides into the seat next to me and opens his laptop. He pulls on his beard thoughtfully. “Might take a bit longer if we need to use facial recognition.”
It’s not the first time he’s offered to hack into systems to try to find Stella.
I fix him with a wary look. “Is it legal?”
Bit Rate scratches his beard and looks away. “It’s the quickest way to find her.”
Which tells me everything I need to know. As tempting as what he’s offering is, I can’t be on the wrong side of the law.
Which leaves me at the mercy of Cleo, waiting until she hears from Stella.
It took me a few weeks of wallowing in self-pity to realize I wasn’t going to forget Stella easily. And to realize that maybe what she wrote on the note wasn’t all she was feeling.
When I replay the weekend in my mind there’s definitely a connection between us, and she must have felt it too. The way she nestled into me, the way our bodies gravitated to each other overnight, the last time we made love.
If only I’d said something to her then, maybe things might have been different. But I told her it was a fling from the start, and I never said it was anything else. Of course she wasn’t going to wait around for a guy who only wanted a fling. I guess when the Crows left, she went with them.
