Total pages in book: 96
Estimated words: 92996 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 465(@200wpm)___ 372(@250wpm)___ 310(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 92996 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 465(@200wpm)___ 372(@250wpm)___ 310(@300wpm)
At the moment, though, that wasn’t going to help me. Because whereas I used to glide through intersections on Friday afternoons without nearly getting hit, just now I’d narrowly missed getting sideswiped by a Toyota Highlander, which was why, suddenly, there was a police utility vehicle beside me. I had called it an SUV in the past, but apparently that was wrong, and I’d been educated.
“Are you trying to kill yourself, Xander Corey!” Tanner Murphy, a recent addition to Osprey, yelled at me as he drove by in the Abundant Light Church van. He was the youth pastor there.
Side note: not everyone in the one-horse town I grew up in liked me. Some, like the aforementioned Tanner, saw me in league with dark supernatural forces. As if I were stupid enough to ever tie myself to something malevolent. Ridiculous. I was raised better than that.
There was also Diana Flint, the leader of the Osprey Conservation Society, who had tried, on many occasions, to have me fired from my job at the town library and banned from teaching classes, which I’d been doing more of lately, at our local youth center. Diana’s hatred had begun in second grade when her family moved here. Her mother thought my grandmother was crazy, which she wasn’t, and a pagan, which she was, and did not want her angel Diana associating with me. That stuck all through high school and beyond. When she took over the aforementioned group, which I thought meant wildlife or the wetlands but was actually historical landmarks and buildings, she needed to map my family’s land. Ours being the oldest homestead in Osprey, it was important to the Conservation Society to have that done. I declined, and she took it to the town council. But as Corvus was older than Osprey, she didn’t have a leg to stand on. That had cemented her animosity toward me. While normally I made sure to steer clear of her on general principle, today she was in one of the many cars that drove past me as I stood on the sidewalk.
“You’re going to kill someone, you idiot!” she shrieked at me.
I waved at her just to be a dick. Her, I wasn’t afraid of. But the man sitting in the vehicle to my left, with the rolled-down driver’s window, him I really didn’t want to piss off.
“Hi,” I greeted Lorne with a huge smile, thinking it was probably my imagination that his cobalt eyes looked even darker than usual. Or, quite possibly, he was mad. Or worse, I’d scared him. I truly never meant to frighten him, but it happened on occasion.
“No,” he replied, getting out of the car that was painted the most horrible shade of blue anyone could imagine. Some heinous cross between teal and bread mold. Why navy hadn’t been considered, I had no idea.
“I was in a hurry and—”
The Mercedes Benz S-Class sedan that came to a screeching halt behind his utility vehicle stopped us both from saying another word, and I wasn’t surprised to see my best friend in the world, Amanda Sterling, throw open the door, leave the car there running, and rush over and smack me really hard in the bicep and then the stomach.
“Ow,” I yelled at her.
“What the hell are you doing?” she roared back. “You took ten years off my life with that stunt!”
Lorne grunted and tipped his head. “What she said.”
I looked from him with his arms crossed, biceps bulging, gaze flat, jaw clenched, to her with her bugged-out eyes, furrowed brows, and tightened fists, and I understood that what I’d seen as a maneuver worthy of a seasoned bike messenger in New York or San Francisco, the two of them had viewed as taunting death. As my grandfather had told me a million times, the truth was in the eye of the beholder, not the one zigzagging through traffic.
“I’m sorry,” I said sincerely to the man I loved desperately, who glowered at me. “I promise to be more careful from now on.”
He leaned in, giving me a quick kiss, and everyone driving by must have thought that I, Xander Corey, was the luckiest man alive. Because not only was Lorne MacBain, who was kissing me, utterly breathtaking, but he was clearly smitten. His smile when he leaned back, how warm his eyes were, had me floating on a cloud of happiness.
Of course, Amanda took that moment to pinch my side. Hard.
“The hell,” I yelled again.
“Where’s my sorry?”
I growled at her, then snapped, “I’m sorry.”
She glared at me.
“I am.” I whined that time.
“Fine,” she said quickly, grinning. “Now, what’s with the weird red metal basket on your bike?”
Lorne groaned and shook his head. “It’s not a weird basket; it’s a new basket.”
She stared at him.
“I put a new fitting on the front here, so now this new one snaps on and off, and it has a built-in handle so he can cart it easily.”