Page 78 of That One Night in Vegas: A Lesbian Romance

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The questions died away, the words fading as the memories

surged over her, until all she felt was the past, like light. It

made her happy, and she was no longer afraid. The pain faded.

The metallic taste in her mouth and the dripping of something

wet all along her body was lost and drowned out by that white,

beautiful light.

And then by the darkness.

Chapter 9

Adalynn

Welson, South Carolina was pretty much the end of the

world as far as most people were concerned. The tiny town of

less than five thousand sprawled over many acres through

endlessly diverse terrain so that the main street and the town

itself were hardly more than a handful of buildings clustered

together against the flow of time.

Time had ebbed and bled away the life of the sprawling

yellow house that belonged to another century. In 1885, it was

in its glory, freshly constructed, birthed from the land where

its foundations drew their strength. In the present day, it was

nothing more than a shambles of a structure. The exterior was

peeling paint, the shutters hung askew or were missing

altogether over what glass was left in the windows. The porch

had half fallen away, and the strange turret built alongside the

far right of the house that extended up all three stories was

domed with the red and gray of peeling shingles that had been

put up in the nineties to replace the original wood.

To anyone else, it was a pile of ruins, the wreckage of

someone’s great aspirations and dreams brought to life in the

middle of nowhere, but to Adalynn it was perfect.

She’d bought the house for eighty-seven thousand dollars.

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