Chapter Four
The past blurred into the present and suddenly she was right back in the pitch-black woods, the damp earth under her hands, warmth at her back from a small fire she shouldn’t have started. That name, the pained whisper of it that made her smile despite everything and the softest, sweetest kiss brushed across her fingers.
Warmth from her amulet jerked her back to the present, and she grabbed the stone around her neck. It couldn’t have been glowing on its own. She hadn’t been using magic, yet she’d felt it superheat her skin.
Cade carefully tugged her hand out of the way, and she let him. She didn’t even look down, too busy telling herself that she had to be wrong, she had to be…
“If you looked spooked before—”
“Wild thing,” she interrupted, her voice sounding far away “Is that….” Her words tripped over themselves and she cleared her throat. “Is that some kind of nickname?”
“Yeah. People have long memories in small towns.”
“Not much stays a secret around here,” she said, her head spinning even as she reminded herself the nickname could mean anything.
“I don’t know about that,” Cade released his hold on her amulet. “Sometimes you just have to know who to trust.” His fingers grazed her jaw, the tender touch trapping her next breath in her lungs.
What if…
What if he was the one who’d set the bar for all the men she’d ever dated? What if he was the one the others had failed to be, could never be, because he’d stolen her heart when she’d barely understood what it felt like to fall in love?
The world nearly rocked off its axis.
Cade drew her closer. “You’re not about to faint on me, are you?”
She shook her head but wasn’t entirely sure her legs were going to hold her up. Probably the Booze. Or not. Maybe it was something a whole lot crazier.
Movement from the corner of her eyes snagged Angel’s attention. Scottie stood off to the side watching them closely. Too closely. One look at her friend’s face and Angel knew.
Oh shit.
“I think she needs some water,” Scottie said, but didn’t make a move to get any. Her eyes never left Angel’s.
“Why don’t you sit for a minute?” Cade coaxed her into sitting on the grass and then jogged away in search of water.
She stared up at her friend, wondering why Scottie never said a word about Cade being the boy from the woods. “You should have told me.”
Scottie gave her a guilty look. “I know.”
“I thought he moved away.” She’d thought about that night in the woods, the details faint but so very real, for months afterward. “You said he moved away.”
“I know.”
“You said it wasn’t like I remembered, that the connection I felt to him must just have been related to the alcohol.” Because no one could fall in love overnight.
Scottie looked at her feet. “I know.”
Well, at least now Angel knew why Scottie had been trying to get her to steer clear of Cade. But it still didn’t explain why one of her best friends had been lying to her for years.
She heard Cade laugh, and she turned to see him nodding in her direction before he fished something out of the cooler on the ground next to his brother.
“He’s real,” she heard herself say. “I didn’t dream any of it. Not one single detail. It was him the whole time.”
“I know you’re probably pissed at me, but there’s more. I didn’t tell you everything because—”
Cade returned and crouched in front of her, offering a bottle of water.
Ethan hovered just behind Scottie, and her friend was doing her best to ignore him. “Can I talk to you?”
“It’s not a good time,” Scottie said without looking at the man trying to get her attention.
“It’s important.”
She shook her head, but Cade rose. “I’ll keep an eye on Angel.”
Ethan swooped in before anyone could say anything else, grabbing Scottie’s hand and tugging her after him. She looked back over her shoulder and mouthed, “I’m sorry.”
So was Angel. Sorry she’d devoured that pumpkin pie that was churning in her stomach now.
Cade nodded for her to take a drink, waiting until she did before asking, “Is everything okay?”
“I’m not sure,” she answered honestly. She’d just come face to face with the boy she’d left behind without a word. They’d never exchanged names because she’d been afraid he might expose her, or that her father would track him down to protect their family.
“Let’s take a walk. If you’re up for it.” Cade waited for her to take another drink before pulling her to her feet.
All around them people danced like they hadn’t been confronted with a past they’d been running from for years, and right now Angel would rather be any one of them. She’d thought of that boy in the woods for years, haunted by the hours he’d refused to let her leave him, by the almost kiss that still replayed in her dreams every few months, and most of all by the certainty she’d exaggerated the whole thing in her head.
But she hadn’t, had she?
She felt the same connection now, felt it every time he sneaked a glanced at her, or in the long heated looks he didn’t even bother to hide. And the way his fingers curled around hers, keeping her close like they did that summer night in the woods.
Cade led her to the water’s edge, and she trailed along next to him, caught between the edge of a dream she’d turned her back on years ago and the very real, very undeniable reality right next to her.
Farther away people stood at the shoreline, already daring someone to go for a swim.
“You never mentioned what brought you to Sapphire Falls,” Cade said.
It wasn’t a topic she’d planned on getting into, but it seemed like an easier one to tackle compared to whether or not to tell Cade that they had in fact met before.
Because if he remembered her, he might also remember what she’d been doing that night in the woods.
“Mostly just avoiding my family, my father in particular.” She waited, half expecting him to ask if they had problems getting along. Instead, he chose a large rock to sit on and pulled her down next to him, giving her more than enough time to decide how much she really wanted to say.
Angel rolled a rock under her foot. “My father thinks I’m not living up to my full potential, that I’m wasting my time with my mural work when I should go back to studying under some important artists and making real cultural contributions.”
“And what do you think?”
“That I don’t want to wake up in ten years and wish I had listened to him.”
He offered a smile. “I know a little about disappointing parents.”
She wondered if that had come up that night in the woods but couldn’t remember. “I’m the youngest and was probably meant to rebel the most, but watching my brothers and my sister take the lead there, I didn’t want to give my dad anything else to stress about.”
“You wanted to make his life easier,” he guessed, like he understood that perfectly.
She nodded. “I’ve spent a long time doing what he wanted, just trying to keep the peace.” Probably too long, which would explain why her father wasn’t handling her making her own decisions so well these days.
“So what happened?”
She glanced at him, not entirely sure where to start, or why it was so easy to talk to him.
“Or did you just wake up and decide you needed to start living for yourself and not him?”
Not exactly, but it surprised her that he wasn’t that far off the mark. “It started with my sister falling in love with a Calder, another w—” she stopped, stunned that she’d let herself almost say witch out loud.
She didn’t have close calls like that with anyone, not even the men she’d dated. With her father’s strong stance on not abusing or relying on their magical ability, she’d gotten used to pretending she was like everyone else, rarely using her gifts except around her family.
She couldn’t say the same about the Calder family, which was a bit of a sore point for her father where they were concerned. “My family hasn’t always gotten along with the Calders, but after the plane crash it got more complicated.”
“Plane crash?” Cade echoed.
“That is a long story but in the Cliff Notes version, my brother was stranded on an island with his ex, also a Calder, and when we found out how it happened…” She trailed off as all the anxiety she’d felt when their plane went missing swirled to the surface.
Cade gave her hand a reassuring squeeze. “We don’t need to talk about it.”
“It’s not that. I guess the whole situation just made me look at everything a little differently, including my relationship with my father.” She’d spent months after the crash trying to pretend nothing had changed, but it had.
“And here you are.”
“Here, I am.” She let out a little laugh that didn’t come close to unraveling the tension coiled around her spine. “I just—”
Cade leaned down and sealed his mouth over hers.
The world fell away with the very first tease of his lips, the contact flipping the breaker on every heat sensor in her body. There was no more chill, the evening breeze coming off the water barely registering when she had over six feet of hard, warm Cade Marshall holding her close.
And it was better than any dream.
His hands slid up her back and into her hair, his fingers curling around her nape, the grip sweet and impossibly possessive all at once. A dizzying combination that made her stomach clench.
There wasn’t an inch separating them from their knees to the tops of their shoulders, and definitely not where his mouth opened over hers, slow and deep, each drugging pass eradicating memories of every kiss that had come before his. But they still weren’t close enough. There was no more room on the rock, but that didn’t stop her from trying to maneuver into a better spot that would allow her to feel him in ways she hadn’t been able to years ago.
His lips curved against hers, like he knew exactly what she had in mind, and then everything got a whole lot crazier. He lifted her into his lap, her knee scraping the rock, but she didn’t care when his scorching mouth never let her forget for a second that this was different, that he was different.
And it excited, worried and flat out terrified her.
His tongue pushed into her mouth, slick and hot and making it so damn hard to remember she wasn’t supposed to be making out on a rock with anyone, not in Sapphire Falls of all places and not with Cade Marshall.
She sank into the kiss even when she knew she had to end it, but not a second before she caged his face in her hands and poured herself into the moment, wanting to set him on fire so they could both burn, both be branded by the memory in case it never happened again. And if she didn’t slow things down, they would go too far and the small piece of her heart he didn’t even realize he already had would be more than she could survive without.
She slowed the kiss, lingering when he pressed his hand to the flat of her back as if he knew she was about to put the brakes on.
“Not yet,” he murmured. “I can’t let you go, yet.” His lips parted, working her over until there wasn’t a cell in her body that wasn’t trembling for him, for the boy she remembered and the man he’d become.
Tearing herself free, she climbed off his lap and walked to the water’s edge. She knew she needed to find out the more Scottie mentioned, but not until she could think straight, and after what just happened, she had a better shot at keeping Cade’s truck on the windy country roads with a gallon of Booze in her system than piecing together two coherent thoughts.
She slipped her boots off and took a tentative step into the water. The frigid river lapped at her toes, and she squealed, jumping back a step before forcing herself to go a little deeper.
Cade laughed and rose from the rock. Thankfully he didn’t walk right up to her but strolled along the water’s edge close-by. More than once she felt him watching her as she skipped rocks, letting all the parts of her come back into balance.
More people walked by the water farther down the shoreline, but no one ventured in their direction.
He didn’t seem to mind the silence that settled between them, and for a few minutes it felt okay not to talk, to just enjoy the glow of the moon on the river, the soft orange light from the bonfire in the distance, the celebratory atmosphere that echoed all around them.
To enjoy it together.
For the first time she was really glad she’d come to Sapphire Falls, and no sooner did that thought cross her mind than she knew she had to quit dragging her heels.
“So…Wild Thing, huh? Must be quite the story for a nickname like that.” That was about as smooth as she could manage when her pulse started racing the second she made up her mind to finally broach the subject.
He didn’t appear surprised that she mentioned it as he picked up one of the flat rocks at the water’s edge. “Wild Thing is a nickname now, but years ago they said it because I was crazy.”
Because he’d told everyone what he’d seen that night? Scottie swore no one had heard what really happened that night, but maybe she hadn’t been honest about that either.
Her friend’s betrayal still stung, but she needed to know why Scottie had lied more than she needed to be mad right now.
* * *
“Why did they think you were crazy?”
A few other women over the years, who couldn’t recall the story or were from outside Sapphire Falls, had asked the same question and he rarely answered any of them. Or if he did, it was with some funny detail he glossed over, never the truth. Until now.
Until a gorgeous blonde he couldn’t stop thinking about for more than ten seconds at a time was asking. And the answer was important to her in ways it hadn’t been to anyone else. She wasn’t interested in the star athlete he’d been, the places he’d been going, the dreams he’d lost out on, the low place he’d dragged himself out of.
She was asking because she felt it too—the fierce pull between them. One part explosive chemistry that had him thinking about all the ways he’d get her out of that dress if they were back at his place. One part tenderness, like he would always be comfortable in his own skin as long as she was around, squeezing his hand and sharing his worries.
And one part fate. Because there was no way in hell you could meet someone and feel like this in less than twenty-four hours.
Unless they had met before.
Angel smoothed her finger across the wet edge of another rock she plucked from the water at her feet.
“I was in the woods one night and hurt my leg pretty bad, broke it actually. No one knew where I was and since it was during the summer festival, everyone was in town.”
“Why weren’t you there?”
“Because of a girl.” It was the only part of the whole damn night that he had been sure about when it was all said and done. “I spotted her from the Ferris Wheel. She’d been standing by the dunk tanks, laughing at something a guy beside her was saying. I don’t even know what it was about her, just that when I saw her smile, I wanted to be the guy she was smiling at.”
“You didn’t know her?”
He shook his head. “No. The festival draws a lot of people from outside Sapphire Falls. I watched her in the crowd for a couple minutes, and when I finally got off the damn ride I tried to find her, but she was gone.” He paused, looked at the frown drawing her brows together. “What?”
“She would have wanted you to find her.”
“How do you know?”
“Because if you had the same expression on your face then as you do know, she would have,” she said softly, then threw her rock. “I’m a girl. We know these things.”
Someone cranked the music louder, and the answering cheers drowned him out for a second. Scottie was bound to come looking for them any minute, and he wanted to finish their conversation before he had to give up on spending the rest of the evening alone with Angel.
“Well finding her became a little tricky. Before I got on the Ferris Wheel, I was with a bunch of guys who thought it would be a great idea to chug some Booze.”
Angel winced.
“Yeah. Not my brightest moment. When I realized I’d had too much, I knew I had to get out of there before anyone caught us. So I went home.”
“Walked I hope.”
Cade nodded. “I was only half stupid that night. Anyway, I was walking home through the woods, trying not to puke my guts out, and well, Cliff Notes version, I fell and broke my leg.”
He left the part out that led to the fall, not entirely sure how she’d respond to that little detail yet. “I was on my own and in a lot of pain.”
“No one heard you?”
“No. I was out there all night and at some point my brain… I don’t know if it was the Booze or the pain or maybe I was just scared, but I imagined I wasn’t by myself. That there was a girl with me.”
“The same one from the Ferris Wheel?”
He shrugged. “Maybe. I was alone one minute and the next she was beside me, covered in mud and telling me she’d get help. I wouldn’t let her leave until she told me her name, but she didn’t. That probably should have been my first clue she wasn’t real.”
She chewed on her bottom lip, leaving the water. “What happened after that?”
“My brother found me the next morning swearing up and down I’d been okay. That a wild thing in the woods had stayed with me all night, but was gone when the sun came up.”
“And he told everyone,” Angel guessed.
Cade laughed. “Hell no, I told everyone. I wanted to know who she was, not realizing she couldn’t have been real, that pretty girls covered in mud didn’t run through the woods in the middle of the night. Not even in Sapphire Falls.”
“So they teased you about it,” Angel said finally, sounding more than a little pissed on his behalf.
He’d been just as pissed at the time, but mostly at himself for believing she’d been real. And then for believing she wasn’t, and having to face that everything he lost that night had been his own damn fault.
Something hit the water to their far right, and he noticed Scottie, hands on her hips, standing over Ethan, who sat ankle deep in the water. Hoots of laughter echoed around them, but whatever had happened, he and Angel had missed it.
Scottie said something they couldn’t hear to Ethan, then spun and marched toward them. Ethan rose from the water, yanking off his shirt as he went, then went after Scottie.
Angel was too busy tugging on her boots to see what was coming.
“Scottie?” Cade called out. “Don’t worry, I’ll get you a towel.”
Angel’s head snapped up at the same time Scottie whirled around. She was too slow to dodge out of Ethan’s path, and he scooped her up and over his shoulder, and carried her into the water.
“Think she’ll drown him?” he asked Angel, who was watching slack-jawed as her best friend was tossed into waist-deep water.
* * *
“Are you okay?” It was a stupid question to ask when her best friend looked anything other than okay, but Angel had to say something.
“Ethan Marshall is an asshole.” Scottie shivered, water dripping down her soaked body. “No, he’s the asshole of a slimy parasite that lives in other people’s assholes.”
Cade had already run to the truck to get something to wrap around Scottie, but watching her friend’s expression morph from shocked to murderous, she kind of wished she’d went with him.
“What happened?”
“He didn’t stay the hell away, that’s what happened.”
Scottie shot the man in question a scathing glance and stormed away from the water. A few people whistled when she walked by, a few even jogging over to see if they could get her anything.
She took the first person up on their offer, snatching a bottle of beer from their hand and continuing on her way. “I owe you one,” she called over her shoulder.
Angel lingered just long enough to watch Ethan contemplate following Scottie himself before he joined a group by the water.
Scottie had polished off more than half the beer by the time Angel reached her. With one parting look at the river, Scottie focused her attention on Angel. “I didn’t mean to take off like that, especially after you found out about Cade. I’m an awful friend. I should have just told you everything to begin with.”
“You’re not awful. But yeah, you should have told me.”
Letting go of her anger was a little easier when her friend looked so miserable. Angel took the beer while there was some left and took a long drink, then handed it back.
“Cade and I talked and he told me what happened that night. He doesn’t even remember anything about my magic.”
At least she had that going for her. If her father had been furious when he’d out found someone witnessed her using magic years ago, she didn’t want to imagine how he’d handle the news if Cade remembered what happened that night.
Her father’s stance on not using their magic had been frustrating over the years, but she knew he clung to his beliefs to ensure they weren’t exposed to a world that would exploit their abilities given the opportunity.
Scottie might have left out the part about Wild Thing and Cade insisting to anyone who would listen that there had been a girl in the woods with him that night, but her friend probably guessed how Thomas Lancaster would have handled that. Or maybe it was not knowing how far he’d go to protect his family that kept Scottie quiet all these years.
Had her grandmother heard about Cade and kept it to herself all these years as well? Maybe Scottie wasn’t the only one holding out on her.
“I know you’ll need some time to get over being pissed at me,” Scottie began. “I just didn’t want you freaking out more than you already were back then.”
“I know.”
Scottie slumped into someone’s abandoned lawn chair. “You’re taking this better than I expected.”
Angel wasn’t sure how she was supposed to take any of it. Maybe in a few hours, after she had time to process it all, she’d know exactly where that left her.
Scottie grabbed her hand. “I really am sorry. I thought the guilt would eat you up.”
She’d felt horrible about the whole thing for a long time, but had come to terms with the unfortunate fallout for everyone involved a long time ago. At least she thought she had.
“It took a while, but he overcame everything eventually,” Scottie continued. “Losing the scholarship was hard on him, but I think he found a new dream looking after his family’s farm.”
“What?”
Scottie paled. “He didn’t tell you?”
“Tell me what, Scottie?” The ache in her stomach was back and a thousand times worse.
“When Cade broke his leg, he lost his football scholarship and his dream of playing football professionally.”