Once Ghosted, Twice Shy (Reluctant Royals, #2.5)

by Alyssa Cole

New shoes point toward the future, sweet daughter. You cannot keep wearing that which you have outgrown.

She’d thought that Fab had smashed their connection like a smartphone beneath a car tire, but all their data had been saved on a cloud drive somewhere, it seemed, and was happily downloading and ready to resume where they’d left off.

“Took you long enough,” she said, finally. Somewhere, the polite part of Likotsi’s mind chided her for blocking the flow of pedestrian traffic, but she didn’t start walking. She slowly adjusted the lapels of her coat and then the hem of each cuff. “Well. I’m certainly worth the wait.”

There was a certain . . . regard in the tilt of her mouth, a mix of courteousness and insinuation. Like she would ask politely before giving you the best head of your life.

Likotsi adored things that took time and care to produce results that weren’t entirely necessary but added something special to the world.

“Finding a sexual partner is easy,” Likotsi replied. “Finding someone that makes you need to know more about them is not.”

She had never understood the veneration of these men, who took their own biases and made them into a country’s laws, but Americans were quite strange, after all.

“After the breakup, I’d hoped that this ridiculous love would leave me as quickly as it had fallen upon me, but it didn’t. It clung like a spiderweb, invisible and impossible to extract myself from. And when I saw you stepping through those train doors this morning, my heart cracked even more because I realized the web was unbreakable. That you could walk into my world, at any time, and that love would still be there, clinging to me. That I’d still want to give you everything.”

And when we are afraid, because we will inevitably be afraid again, let’s run to each other instead of away.”