Anywhere at al .

I looked in the rearview mirror, watching the main house as I contemplated what to do. I’d taken that road before. Twice. Both times had been in the middle of the night, in a stolen car. Both times I’d been running away. Both times I’d been caught. But I couldn’t run this time, even just to think. I’d spent every moment since my homecoming trying to convince my family that I’d changed, that I was older and wiser. Sitting at the end of the driveway, freedom within sight, I realized that I couldn’t blame them for not believing me. If I wanted them to take me seriously, I’d have to prove I’d changed.

Leaving would only prove that I hadn’t.

Quickly, before my nerve failed me, I slammed the car into Reverse and stepped on the gas with my bare foot, backing carefully toward the main house. I was through running. I would face the consequences of my actions like the adult I’d claimed to be.

But as the front gate grew smal er in the windshield, my resolve began to falter. I was stil determined to confront my fears—just not yet. I stil needed to think. I couldn’t face Marc again without knowing what I was going to say to him.

Not to mention Jace.

Halfway down the driveway, I noticed the ruts Owen’s truck had carved through the grass on repeated trips to the barn. I stopped the Pathfinder, staring at the outbuilding in the middle of the eastern field. The barn. I hadn’t been in the barn in ages. We’d played there as children, al five of us. Six, if Jace was visiting.

We didn’t have animals, but we always had plenty of hay until Daddy sold it as winter feed. So during the summer, we’d play in the barn, using the bales as forts, castles, wrestling mats, tables and anything else our fertile imaginations could envision.

Eventual y, the others outgrew our hay bale playground, but I never did. In a houseful of boys, I’d needed someplace quiet to think and to read. Even years later, the smel of fresh hay brought to mind hours spent in the company of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Louisa May Alcott. The barn had served as my refuge once, and it would do so again.

Using the side-view mirror for guidance, I backed past Owen’s ruts and shifted out of reverse, then turned onto the dirt path, already imagining the smel of hay. I pulled to a stop twenty feet in front of the barn, leaning over the steering wheel to stare out the windshield for a moment in silence. Nothing had changed. It was as if time stood stil on the ranch, like we lived in some kind of weird warp zone of nostalgia.

I opened the car door and got out, leaving the keys in the ignition and the headlights on. I wouldn’t be able to see much of anything, otherwise, unless I wanted to Shift—which I did not. Serious thinking was best done in human form, with no feline instincts to get in the way.

My hand was on the knob of the smal corner door, about to pull it open, when my bladder gave me my final warning. If I didn’t find a restroom soon, or at least a clump of brush, I was going to embarrass myself and ruin a perfectly good pair of shorts.

Desperate for relief, I searched the dark for somewhere appropriate to relieve myself. Several yards away stood an apple tree, short but healthy and beautifully formed. It wasn’t my first choice but I no longer had the luxury of being picky. I headed for the tree in an all-out sprint, and almost fel twice as my feet slipped in the cool morning dew.

The thin tree trunk didn’t provide much cover, but with no one else around, I was only hiding from my own humiliation.

With the pressure on my bladder relieved, I took my time sauntering back toward the Pathfinder, mental y composing an apology to Marc. Goodness knows I’d done plenty of that in the past. Especial y that infamous summer five years earlier.

Two years before that, when I was sixteen and becoming seriously interested in boys from school, my mother and father had begun to push me toward Marc.

They pushed, and I resisted, and they pushed some more. Eventual y, they pushed too hard, and I actually fell—right into his bed. And wouldn’t you know it, as soon as they got what they wanted, they reversed course, tel ing us to slow down, that we had our whole lives to get to know each other that well.

From then on, they’d tried to keep us chaperoned, at least until I was old enough to get married, the summer I turned eighteen. But by then, as I watched my classmates apply to col ege and choose their future careers, I’d realized what I would be giving up for Marc: my entire life. So, the night before our wedding, I’d snuck out of the house with my savings and taken Ethan’s then-new convertible for a two-week journey of self-discovery, hunting when I was hungry, and sleeping whenever and wherever the opportunity arose.

They’d found me, of course, and because I’d stil loved him, the apology I owed Marc was the single hardest thing I’d ever had to compose. But this new one came in a close second.

I was less than a foot from the double barn doors when the headlights flickered to my left. Concerned for Jace’s battery, I turned away from the barn, squinting into the bright light as I veered toward the Pathfinder.

Metal creaked in front of me, and the lights sank, then bobbed, blinding me al over again. Startled, I jumped, my hand moving automatical y to shield my eyes.

They focused reluctantly. I froze, my mouth suddenly dry.

A man leaned against Jace’s gril e, his features indistinct in the wedge of darkness between the two cone-shaped beams of light. Had Jace heard me start his car? With my eyes crippled by the headlights, my nose came to the rescue. One whiff of the dew-scented, early-morning air told me exactly who I’d let sneak up on me.