Page 145 of Bone’s Choice

It had only been two fucking days, and somehow that was starting to feel like too damn long.

Chapter Twenty-One

Hazel

My feet hurt.

Not the cute kind of hurt where I could kick off my shoes and complain for five minutes before forgetting about it. They fucking hurt.

I rolled my shoulders as I drove down the dark road toward home, trying to work out the knot that had settled between them sometime around ten o’clock. Bing’s hadn’t been insanely busy, but it had been steady all night, and steady almost seemed worse. There hadn’t been enough of a lull to sit down for more than two minutes, but there also hadn’t been enough chaos to make the hours fly by.

Crystal had left before me, and Kori had spent the last twenty minutes of our shift talking about the cinnamon roll she’d saved from the farmers market like she had a lover waiting for her at home.

I was pretty sure she needed help.

Then again, the cinnamon roll had been really good.

I smiled and turned onto my road.

The farther I got from town, the darker it became. Houses disappeared, streetlights became nonexistent, and trees crowded both sides of the road. I’d thought it might bother me when I’d first moved here.

It didn’t.

I liked it.

For half a second, Bone crossed my mind. Not that I’d spent all night thinking about him.

I hadn’t. I was pretty proud of that fact.

Okay, maybe I’d thought about him twice. Three times. Possibly four, but one of those had been because Taco and his stupid strawberry jam had popped into my head, and that had led to Bone, so I didn’t think it should count.

Either way, I wasn’t sitting around wondering when he was going to call.

We’d had sex.

Amazing sex.

Then he’d left the next morning.

That was okay. I didn’t need to turn it into something it wasn’t.

I slowed as my house came into view.

Pink’s porch light was on next door, but the rest of her house was dark. Mine was exactly how I’d left it, with the little lamp in the living room glowing through the front window.

Except there was something in my driveway that hadn’t been there when I’d left.

A motorcycle. My stomach flipped. “Oh.” I pulled in behind my unexpected visitor and killed the engine.

For someone I’d been doing such an excellent job not thinking about, I knew exactly whose bike it was before I even saw him.

Bone sat on my front porch.

He was leaned back in one of the chairs with his long legs stretched in front of him, boots crossed at the ankles. His cut was open over a black T-shirt, and even in the dim light from the porch, I could see his arms folded over his chest.

Waiting for me.

I sat in the SUV for a second. “Well,” I whispered. Apparently, Bone hadn’t gotten over doing the casual disappearing act.