I felt a distant click as if two parts of a jigsaw puzzle had slipped into place.
He stared at me and I stared right back.
He strode across the large coffee shop and approached an empty table.
His eyes never left mine.
Oh. My. God.
It was probably bad manners to keep staring at someone like this, slack-jawed and drooling.
But I couldn’t pull my eyes from his.
Finally, he sat down and broke the bond between us.
I slowly turned in my seat to look back at Isabella.
She beamed at me.
“He’s the one. I know it.”
“He’s… probably here to meet someone.”
There was no way a creature as splendid as him could be single.
Was there?
“There’s only one way to find out,” Isabella said. “Go to him.”
I shook my head.
“If you don’t go over there, I will. And did you see the way he looked to you? Honestly, I’ve seen wolves with less hunger.”
Cool reality settled into my bones.
“He wouldn’t be interested in me.”
Isabella slapped my hand.
“Don’t let those loser pheromones seep out through your pores. Now’s not the time or the place. You should speak with him.”
“And embarrass myself? I don’t think so.”
It was strange, I thought.
It wasn’t just his appearance that drew me in.
It was… something else.
That click I heard symbolized something deeper, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
A spark, I realized.
That’s what it was.
Our eyes meeting and clicking like that were like bringing two flint rocks together and igniting something deep in my chest.
The deep longing for someone to sweep me off my feet.
My white knight.
Don’t be so stupid, I snapped.
It’s not love.
It’s lust.
I doubted many females wouldn’t feel the same way toward him.
He was a dish after all.
A dish that deserved to be consumed with gusto.
“He’s getting up.”
Isabella announced it as if it were breaking news.
“You should go order another coffee.”
“I haven’t finished this one yet.”
“It doesn’t matter about the damn coffee! Grab a muffin. I’m hungry.”
“You never eat breakfast.”
“Today I’ll make an exception. Go.”
Panic swelled in my chest.
Daydreaming about the guy and taking action were completely different things.
“I look horrible. And I’m suffering from a breakup.”
“You do look horrible, I’ll give you that. But if you don’t join him in the line soon one of these tarts will.”
I cast an eye over the adjacent tables and noticed each of them staring openly in his direction.
Half their number sighed deeply—some even while sitting with their husbands and dreaming their own imaginings of what it would be like to be swept off their feet by the stranger who’d just entered their lives.
Others were old enough to be his mother—even his grandmother!
With so much competition, what chance did I have?
“I’m not in the mood. I need to get over Jason first. Then I can go fishing.”
For the first time since the hunk had entered the coffee shop, Isabella tore her eyes from him and focused on me.
She placed a hand on mine.
“Listen to me. Normally, I would agree with you. Even jerks like Jason can bury their claws deep inside you. You can’t fuck a guy without some sort of bond forming. But that’s over now. You can mourn over him later. And when you go fishing for someone to replace that insignificant hole he left in your heart, you can find another tiny shard of plankton like him any day of the week. But when a whale like this comes into your life, you have to grab it with both hands and take advantage of it. Otherwise, you’ll regret what could have been.”
Her words had a surprising effect on me.
She wasn’t usually this deep or thoughtful.
A flicker of hope percolated through my cloud of depression, caused by Jason’s flimsy excuse of being too busy and not having the time to give me a “proper” relationship.
My fears of this hunk turning me down wouldn’t be as painful now as a day when I felt at my best.
So what difference would approaching him make?
None, I realized.
I couldn’t sink much lower.
I peered over at the hunk and checked out his awesome tight ass waving at me as if to say hello.
I found myself drifting up out of my chair and floating toward him.
I might have been controlled by a puppet master.
Perhaps I was—Isabella.
I drew up behind him in the line, the curve of his chin peering at the menu board, scanning the items.
Well, there was something new on the menu, not yet advertised.
Me.
And I didn’t have to cost a dime.
I shut my eyes and shook my head.
Isabella’s thoughts had become my own.
Heaven help me.
Kayal
I knew it wasn’t going to be a good day.
I knew it from the moment I glanced out the window as I sailed through Earth’s atmosphere.
The clouds were a dull grey, and in the distance, flashes of lightning and thunder nipping at its heels.
Every time something bad happened in my life, it happened during a thunderstorm.
But they weren’t always domestic storms on a planet’s surface, but solar storms that operated in space.
Each time they happened, the direction of my life changed dramatically.
Today would be no different if, as I expected, I would locate my fated mate.
I sat my ship down on a small clearing of grass in an otherwise built-up section of the city.
It’d been a long journey and I was in no mood to waste time now.
I marched outside without even considering the weather.
My mind was somewhere else.
I was halfway to the pulsing beacon of my fated mate’s location before I realized I was soaked through.
It was only water.
It didn’t matter.
What mattered was my recollection of the first major storm I saw as a child.
It was a solar storm, a rare event on my home planet.
At least, I thought it was.
I’d been removed from it from a tender age and couldn’t recall what the cyclical events were like.
But I did remember that storm.
The bolts of savage purple lightning never made landfall but lit up the sky in nature’s greatest firework display.
Cords of angry pink and yellow trailed the lightning.
I was no older than five years old, precocious, and clutching my
