Quest (Shifter Island Book 4) Read Free Page A

the time.
    That was then, and this was now.
    Her companion for the wedding would be a cousin of the groom, a nice, outgoing guy she’d met only briefly. Evan? No, Ernie.
    No doubt people would gossip about them, ask if they were a couple.
    SKY , she told herself. Think sky. Birds. Big fluffy clouds.
    But visions of thunderstorms started to intrude. Lightning, thunder, maybe some hail.
    Golf-ball-sized hail. High winds. Roads being flooded out, power lines falling. Maybe a tornado.
    “Ohhhhhh, Allllllisonnnnnn,” Julie moaned.
    A tornado—one that would sweep her away, to somewhere else, like Dorothy—seemed like a good idea.
     
    She wasn’t able to break away to her hotel room until almost an hour later, after Julie and the bridesmaids had all agreed to go their separate ways for a while so they could catch up on “real life” before dinner.
    Julie had managed to wipe away her tears, and although she went on looking mournful, she didn’t mention Four Years Ago to the others; all she did was send Allison a series of increasingly regretful looks.
    Dinner? Dinner was going to be a real treat.
    Allison felt wiped out as she walked through the lobby of the little all-suites hotel five minutes’ drive from Julie and Matt’s new townhouse. There was a knot in her stomach, a mini-black hole that seemed to be sucking all the energy out of her.
    Matt’s cousin Ernie was part of it. He seemed nice enough, definitely someone she wasn’t cringing at being paired with, but he wasn’t someone she’d choose, either from a dating site or, say, out at a bar. He was just… wrong.
    They were all just… wrong.
    It’d been almost a year since her last attempt at a serious relationship, the latest in a line of crash-and-burns. She worked too hard, those guys had all told her. She ought to kick back more, give herself a chance to relax.
    But she couldn’t do that, not if she hoped to become a partner at RhodesJanisCo, the state’s most talked-about PR agency, one that—although it was less than ten years old—was on the fast track to national attention. Allison was one of their Hot Half-Dozen, the junior members of the team who could guarantee impressive results: new contracts, more media attention, happy clients.
    She jabbed the elevator button impatiently, then stepped back to wait.
    Partner by the time she turned 30—that was her goal. Her own loyal stable of clients.
    There was no place in that formula for someone else.
    Even though she ached to be able to walk through the front door of her home at the end of a long day and find someone waiting for her. Someone who was delighted to see her, and would greet her with warm, passionate kisses.
    Someone who’d smile at her across the dinner table, snuggle with her on the couch to watch some TV, then sweep her into his arms and carry her off to bed.
    Not only wasn’t there anyone waiting for her in the hotel room, it smelled a little of disinfectant, some lemon-scented, bleachy kind of thing—bathroom cleanser, no doubt.
    Frowning, Allison pulled the curtains aside to see if she could open the window, but it was set in place. The room was already too cool for her to crank up the AC. For a moment she was tempted to break the window—to grab one of the uncomfortable-looking chairs and throw it through the glass, like she’d seen people do in the movies.
    Then she had a vision of the chair bouncing off the window and smacking her in the head.
    She’d have an enormous purple bruise to go along with that Not Pale Daffodil dress. Or maybe a concussion.
    Swell.
    Glad, at least, for the temporary peace and quiet, the respite from her friends’ giggling and squealing and fretting and big dime-sized tears, she hurried to take off her stiff, crisp (and now kind of wrinkled) outfit. She thought about the jeans and t-shirt, then went for the battered sweats she’d brought to sleep in if the room’s AC was too uncooperative.
    They felt good against her skin, warm and soothing, so she