Page 5 of A Secret Crush Valentine's

No wonder she’d nearly forgotten how to breathe the day she caught him staring at her in the hallway. She’d reluctantly brushed it off, figuring it was a random coincidence—maybe he’d been staring at someone else, and she’d gotten in the way.

But then it happened again andagain. He’d caught her once staring at him from the stands during football practice andsmiledat her.

Julia had practically run all the way home that day.

Over the next few weeks, they bumped into each other in the hallways and even chatted a little. She doubted he knew her name. He always called herRed, which she figured was because of her hair. Julia didn’t mind. Why he even bothered to talk to someone like her, she had no idea, but there was no denying how amazing it felt.

She should’ve known it was too good to be true.

It happened in the middle of January. By then, the hallways of Laudville were filled with talk about the Valentine’s Day Dance that was weeks away. She’d been hoping Damon would ask her to the dance—a fantasy she’d nursed from the first day they made eye contact. And when he offered, out of the blue, to walk home with her one day, she’d been certain her wish was coming true.

And then they decided to cross that frozen lake. However, it wasn’t as frozen as they thought.

She recalled the sound of the ice cracking beneath their feet, the roaring of water in her ears as she drowned…

By a stroke of luck, she’d been rescued and resuscitated, but by then, Damon was gone. Not dead, not discharged from the hospital she’d been rushed to. Just…gone, like he’d never even been there.

The authorities had scoured the lake for a body but had found nothing. As far as anyone was concerned, he’d somehow vanished from the face of the earth. Months passed before his family, and the police gave up on the search and declared him dead.

Julia never went to the dance, partly because she’d been stuck recovering at home until March. And in the years that followed… well, she never gave Valentine’s Day much thought. She didn’thateValentine’s; she just couldn’t help remembering that day in January when the guy she’d had the biggest crush on fell through the ice and never came back up.

With some effort, she brushed the thought from her mind, relying on the snow leopard’s keen senses to scan her surroundings. Besides a few animals and trees scattered about, there was no sign of life.

But peopleliveon this mountain,she thought.

She’d been here long enough to figure that out. The campfire sites and cabins that had seen better days had been a dead giveaway, not to mention the tracks. A couple of times, she’d even thought she caught the scent of humans, but she’d given them a wide berth. The last thing they needed was a snow leopard snarling at them for help.

Or a naked redhead,she mused. Her best option was to keep heading downhill, which brought another problem to the fore: At her current pace, she should have reached the bottom of the mountain by now or at leastseenit. But, besides the snow and the sky above, she’d seen nothing else. No buildings in the distance, not even the sea.

Where am I, anyway? Weren’t we flying over Nebraska just before the plane came apart?

It was just another question she could not answer, besides the fact that she was surrounded by snow when she woke up on thismountain. She figured the temperature would rise as she headed down the mountain, but no such luck.

I’ve seen some pretty weird crap as a weather reporter,she thought, slowing her pace as she navigated around a pile of boulders, but this takes the cake. This is weird, conspiracy-theory-kind-of weird. This is the sort of made-up crap you see on YouTube.

None of this should be possible. There shouldn’t be this much snow when the weather report at the airport had predicted clear skies and moderate temperatures. She certainly shouldn’t be on a mountain in the middle of nowhere when she’d been flying thousands of feet above Nebraska moments before the disaster occurred.

There was only one cause for any of this:Magic. Bloody hell. Of course.

She never was particularly fond of magic. Growing up, she was warned about magic users and the atrocities they were capable of. No doubt a magic user was behind all of this.

It’s going to get cold very soon.

Wasn’t that what the woman on the plane had said?

If Julia had fists instead of paws, she would have balled them in annoyance right now. How hadn’t she figured it out sooner? A weird-looking woman with an even weirder-looking book just happened to predict the weather and figure out Julia’s shifter nature?

But why doom an entire plane? That part made even less sense to Julia.

At any rate, she’d like to get back home. To hell with the Four Seasons Hotel. She’d take her boring, annoying job over living like this.

You’re a long way from home,she told herself.This can’t be the States.

She was just going to have to keep moving and try to survive until—

Swoop. Swoop. Swoop.

The sound came from above. It was the sound of wings, very, very large wings.

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