Page 103 of Stubborn as a Shadow

When his tears faded, I brushed a kiss to his still-damp hair.

“I love you,” I whispered. “I know it’s fast, but I do. No matter what. I’ll always be at your side.”

“My mo—I mean The Eternal Magic—she said that too.” His voice sounded wrecked. “That she loved me. Do you think it’s true?”

“Yes,” I said. I wasn’t lying either. And he’d know that.

We stayed that way for a long while, just holding one another in the darkness, listening to one another breathe. Then, just as I was drifting off to sleep, I heard him whisper, “I love you too.”

38

WHY DO I HAVE A BELLY BUTTON?

MORGAN

When I woke, I was alone in bed. I blinked and tried to get my bearings. How long had I slept? It felt like twenty hours, but I doubted it was that long.

The room was lit with a single table light on the far side of the room, which is where I found my mate. He had a headset on and was bent over a desk. I didn’t know what he was working on, but he looked absorbed in his task.

The world outside the second-story window had taken on that warm glow that only happened at either sunrise or sunset. I looked around for a clock and found my phone charging on the nightstand. Excellent. My mate was so thoughtful. It hadn’t even crossed my mind to plug it in.

I glanced at the screen.

The good news: I’d only slept away the daylight hours. The bad news: I had forty-six missed messages. Oops.

I opened the messaging app and saw Violet had been messaging endlessly over the last few days. She was going to killme for not calling as soon as I could. I’d meant to, but then… well… I got distracted. I was a terrible, terrible cousin.

I didn’t read the messages. I didn’t need to. They would just be varying levels of panic and worry.

I pulled up her number, but I hesitated before placing the call. That wasn’t like me, but…

Now that I knew the truth about my birth, what would I say to her? Her dad died because of that stupid crystal. And she’d been right there, helping me any way she could, while I tried to find it again. Knowing that it was all for naught? Yeah. That was a tough truth to accept.

No. I couldn’t face her questions yet. I needed a hug from my sexy mate first.

I dropped my phone and scrambled out of bed, pulling the sheet with me and wrapping it like a toga around my body. Nelson must have heard me, because he turned as I approached. The bright smile on his face when he saw me had me diving into his arms. He pulled off his headset with one hand and tugged me into his lap with his other.

“Hey, beautiful,” he said. “How do you feel?”

“What are you doing?” I asked, not ready to talk about my mixed-up thoughts quite yet. The strangest things covered his desk. I had no idea what it all meant. “Are these the geocache things you talked about?”

While we were trapped in that cabin, he’d described all the cool things he’d found and the fun things he’d hidden. But seeing them was something different. I picked up what looked like a pinecone, but it definitely wasn’t. Nothing on the table was what it appeared to be, from the Oreo cookie to the AA batteries to the rusty bit of rebar.

“This is wild,” I said, rolling a small bolt between my fingers. “It looks just like the real deal.”

“Right?” Nelson nodded. “I bought a lot of these online, but now that we aren’t traveling for our work as much anymore…” He shrugged. “I was thinking of getting a 3-D printer so I could try making my own containers. And maybe make some more complex caches, where you have to solve a series of clues before you find the main cache.”

“That is so cool.” I wiggled, thinking about the possibilities. “Have you hidden things in Willow Lake?”

“A few…”

“What about here at the inn?”

He nodded.

“Has anyone found them?”

“I don’t know if anyone has looked. Geocaching tends to be more of a human pastime, but I’m not going to post about caches in Willow Lake on a human website.”