Chapter 216

Chapter 216: Chapter 216

Heather

Your stomach is about as comfortable as a hunk of granite. I rolled over enough so that I could bite Brent’s side.

"Ouch! Watch it."

I laughed softly. "It was barely a nip, you baby."

"Barely a nip? You nearly drew blood. Is this payback for biting you? Or are you going vamp on me?"

I rolled my eyes. "Like that’s even possible."

"Well, you were bitten..." His contained laughter was so overwhelming it became my own for a second before I stifled it.

"You’re such a dork."

Brent rolled, and I was pinned under two-hundred and twenty pounds of handsome. All joking was gone, instantly replaced with hunger. ℴ

He ran the tip of his nose along my neck, sending goose bumps across my skin, before pressing a feather-light kiss just below my ear. I melted into the sand.

Are you more comfortable now?

"Mmmm," was all I could manage. I wrapped my arms around him, pulling his body flush against mine. He moaned against my neck, and suddenly I was on fire. Every place his body touched me was too much and not enough. This is the best.

What is?

You. This beach. No people.

He rose and lifted off his glasses so that I could focus on his amber eyes. "I’m glad you’re happy."

"I wish we could stay here forever..." But I knew we’d have to go home. Maybe soon. There was something coming—

Stop, Brent’s voice interrupted my thoughts. Everything is fine. There’s nothing—

You don’t know that.

And you don’t know everything isn’t okay. Brent had said that about a million times today, and I knew it was true. I just couldn’t let this go. Nothing is going to happen.

I wanted to believe Brent, but the what-if’s were driving me bonkers, and the lack of visions was adding to my nerves.

It might not be as bad as you think. It could be something as simple as your subconscious cutting off your visions so you can deal with how powerful our bond has gotten.

I definitely liked his theory better than my own. I guess that’s possible. There had been a lot of changes in my life in the last few months, but my gut was telling me it was more than that. I couldn’t ignore my instincts anymore.

Before I grabbed my cell from my beach bag, I was going to give my visions one more go. I tightened my grip around Brent and closed my eyes.

I pictured St. Francis’s in my mind. The quad and five buildings surrounding it. I want to see St. Francis’s, I thought as I relaxed my mental barrier, willing myself to see what was going on back in Texas.

I felt the familiar tingling along my skin as the vision started, but the mental image of St. Francis’s disappeared.

Everything went dark.

My heartbeat thumped in my ears and I tried to picture anything, but all I saw was black. All I got were feelings. Despair so strong I wanted to curl up in a ball and sob. Pain. It was like my heart was being ripped from my chest. Fear. So much fear. Enough fear to cool my sun-heated skin. My breath whooshed out of me.

Brent’s weight was suddenly gone as he jerked

me up to sit, pulling me from the vision. I blinked at him. The sudden brightness was blinding, but it wasn’t enough to shake me free of the vision. A trickle of dread tiptoed up my spine and I wanted it gone. "What was that?" I asked when I had enough air to talk.

"Your heart. It skipped a beat." His voice was barely more than a whisper.

"What?" How was that possible? I’d never had anything like that happen before.

My eyes burned and I blinked to keep my tears from falling. I tried to tell myself that the feelings from the vision didn’t mean anything—that it wasn’t some future fate of my friends at St. Francis’s—but that was too close to a lie. I’d felt that fear and despair for a reason.

Brent wiped a hand down his face, not really hiding his fear. "You have your phone here?"

I nodded. I’d been using it for music while reading.

"Are you calling Xander or Claudia?"

I’d been planning on calling Chris, but now that he said Claudia’s name, I wanted to call her, too. She’d have a little more insight on my visions. "Both. But Xander first." If there wasn’t anything immediately wrong in Texas, then Claudia would be my next call.

"I’m going to get us some food. If Chris says they need our help, just grab the stuff and come back to the house. It’ll take some doing, but we’ll get travel booked and head back."

"Thank you." I’d been hoping it wouldn’t come to this. "I wish our honeymoon didn’t have to end so soon."

"You don’t know that it will yet. And if it has to, then we’ll have plenty of time to come back. This is just the beginning for us. Okay?"

I nodded. "Okay."

He pulled me against him, squeezing tight. His fear was lingering, making him anxious. He was thinking about how scared he was to leave me alone on the beach.

I’m okay, I said.

No more weird heart things while I’m gone, okay?

I laughed. I’ll do my best. But it wasn’t like I had any control over it.

When he pulled away, I laid back down, focusing on him as he walked back to the beach house. I could feel the sand under his feet. The brush of leaves against his arm as he pushed a shrub out of the way. Hunger was growing in him. My thoughts filled with images of sandwiches, piled high with turkey and avocado.

The water splashed on my toes—drawing me back to my own body—so I got up and scooted our stuff out of reach from the rising tide.

I sat back down on our bright red and blue striped beach towel and dug my phone out of my bag. It took me a few minutes to turn on the data and accept the ten-dollars-per-day fee for international usage, which was basically highway robbery. Even with the fee, data on the beach was slower than anything.

Before I called Xander, I figured I should check my email and see if anyone had been trying to reach us.

When my email finally loaded, I groaned. I must’ve gotten over a hundred messages for every day we’d been gone, all of them useless junk—coupons and sales and newsletters from places I didn’t care about. Except for the Above and Beyond newsletter. That one was legit.

I started deleting emails, but then gave up and switched to skimming through to see if there were any from actual people I knew. Eighty-ish emails down, there was an email that caught my eye. The subject was Demon Attacks from cmatthewsntxwwp... C Matthews. Xander