Page 31 of Wolf's Forbidden Curse

“I mean, I could head back to the house right now, and we could?—”

“Oh, hey, the bus is pulling up!”

I peered around the tree and saw that she was lying. The bus was nowhere in sight.

“I have to go,” she said. “I hate talking on the phone while sitting next to strangers. Bye!” She hung up before I could say anything else, and then I watched her put her phone away and get up from the bench. She headed north, towards where the house was located, apparently deciding she was going to walk instead of wait around for the bus. For a split second, I thought about running to catch up with her, coming clean about having been there the whole time, but I ended up staying put. She’d lied to get off the phone with me, which meant she was still mad. If she found out that I’d avoided her, it would only make things worse.

So I went inside the building and, instead, headed for the locker rooms, more in need of a good workout now than I was before.

At lap fifty, I took a break.

I was out of breath and my arms were starting to get tired. I pulled myself out of the water and dried off with one of the impossibly small towels provided by the rec center. A group of women in string bikinis walked by and smiled at me. I waved but didn’t try talking to any of them. That’s not what I’d come to the pool for.

I had only just sat on the edge of the lounge chair. However, then I spotted a woman I was actually very interested in talking to.

Katrina.

She was sitting on the other side of the pool, where there weren’t designated laps or anything, and she had her feet in the water. She wasn’t wearing a bathing suit, and she’d had to roll up her pants in order to not get them wet. Without thinking, I got to my feet and dove back into the water. I swam underneath all the lanes with only a single breath, then popped up on the other side directly in front of her. She smiled and didn’t seem surprised to see me.

“Took you long enough to notice,” she said.

“You’ve been here a while?”

She shrugged. “Twenty minutes, maybe.” She looked up at the sky. “The forecast said it was going to rain, but now I don’t see a single storm cloud.”

I grinned. “Were you watching me swim this whole time?”

“I was watching everyone swim, not just you,” she said. “Don’t flatter yourself.”

“Alright, well still, what are you doing here?” I asked. “And don’t say you came for a swim because I think we both know that’s complete bullshit just based on your outfit alone.”

“I wasn’t going to say that.”

“Why then?”

“Would you believe me if I said I came looking for you?”

She was flirting. That much was obvious. But I wasn’t about to jump right into the deep end of this back and forth until I had at least some sense of what was going on.

“How did you know I was going to be here?”

“Your friend Matt told me. I ran into him on the beach a little while ago. First, he gave me a bit of a lecture on how I should conduct myself regarding you, his best friend, and then he let slip that I could find you swimming laps here.”

Oh shit! Matt!

I’d forgotten to text him and ask if he’d go along with my lie to Nic. It had been over an hour since I spoke to her on the phone, so if she arrived home and Matt was already there, the lie had probably already been uncovered.

“You good?” she asked. “You look like you just saw a bolt of lightning or something?” Her head shot upwards again. “Are we about to get dunked on?”

“No, it’s not that.”

“Then what?” She frowned. “Should Matt not have told me where you were?”

“Wha—oh no. I don’t care that he did.” If there was anyone who could get me to move past my panic that quickly, it was this girl. I looked up into her golden hazel eyes and relaxed almost immediately. Whatever was going to happen between Nic and I was something I could worry about later. “I’m glad he did. I was hoping we’d get a chance to see each other while I had some time off. I work at the fishery. Did I tell you that?”

“If you did, I don’t recall,” she said.

I rolled my eyes. “You can’t give up your ‘cool, mysterious chick’ act for even a second, can you?”

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