Page 8 of Fangirl Down

That prickle behind her eyes got stronger and she hung up, blowing out a pent-up breath. She’d give herself five minutes to gather some courage, then she’d come up with a plan. Surely the government was allocating funds for disaster victims, right? Although she knew from past experience with hurricanes that it could takeyearsto see that money—

“Hello?”

Josephine froze at the sound of that voice, calling from outside the shop.

She would know that raspy baritone in the middle of a monsoon.

It sounded like Wells Whitaker, but she had to be mistaken. Low blood sugar tended to make her slightly dizzy, her thoughts fuzzing together like cotton. The man who had fallen off the face of the planet three weeks ago was not knocking on the last remaining intact window of the Golden Tee Pro Shop.

“Belle, you in there?”

Belle.

No one called her that but Wells.

No. No way.

No.

She turned around and nudged the door open with her toe, which wasn’t very difficult, since it hung by a single hinge. “Uh... hi? Whoever you are?”

A rush of breath. “Josephine.”

None other than Wells Whitaker’s face appeared in the doorway. Also, his body. It was there. All of him was there. He wasn’t dressed for golf, as she was used to seeing him. Instead, he wore a black hoodie, jeans, his signature backward ballcap, dark hair sticking out from every side. His sideburns were overgrown, on course to collide with his unshaven facial hair where it scaled the sides of his sculpted face. His eyes were bloodshot and the smell of alcohol was basically the third occupant in the room.

Yet, despite the fact that he currently looked like human roadkill, he somehow retained his mystique. His Wells-ness. This was the guy who would lead the ragtag group of strangers in a dystopian universe. Everyone would just follow him without question. No one would be able to help it, because he had thisway of moving and observing that said,Yeah, okay, civilization is dead, so what?

And he washere.

“What... is going on?”

His eyes moved sharply over her body, as if assessing for injury. “You’re okay.” A beat passed, his gaze meeting hers and holding. “Right?”

Physically, she was fine.

Just a little worried about the obvious hallucination taking place.

“Yes. I’m...” She blinked several times, trying to get her eyes to stop playing tricks on her. “What are you doinghere?”

He rolled a single shoulder. “I just happened to be staying with a friend, not too far away. I remembered you saying something about your family owning... a pro shop? While I was out walking around, looking at the damage, I kind of just stumbled on this place by accident.”

Josephine gave all of that a moment to sink in and none of it made the remotest lick of sense. “But... really? You came to stay with a friend in the direct path of a hurricane? And... this course is twomilesfrom any residential area. You’d have to walk—”

“Josephine, you know a lot about me, right? Probably way too much.”

“A Sagittarius raised in southern Georgia, you were discovered by one of golf’s most legendary masters, Buck Lee, while—”

“Then you also know I hate answering questions.”

That was the understatement of the century. Wells had once spent a full thirty minutes scrolling on his phone during a post-tournament press conference, completely ignoring the rapid-fire questions about a shouting match that had ensued with his caddie on the sixteenth hole. When his time was up, he’d calmly gottenup and swaggered out of the media tent, earning himself the nickname the Media unDarling.

“Yes, I do know that about you.”

“Good.”

Leaving that single word hanging in the air, Wells waded into the water left standing in the shop, charting the damage from beneath a furrowed brow. Josephine was grateful for the break in conversation, because now that her initial shock over Wells Whitaker appearing out of the blue had worn off, she was remembering all the reasons she’d made the painful decision to relinquish her fangirl status.

True, fangirls didn’t quit. They were loyal to the end. But that day on the golf course, when he’d torn her sign in half, he’d ripped apart something inside her, too.

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