B008IJW70G EBOK (2 page)

      Hadn’t Sophia said something about wildlife? She’d thought maybe bear, but what moved that fast, and was that big, and that black? 

      She wanted to be sick. Was this punishment for saying she wished she could die too? Because being killed by some sort of super-sized zoo animal was not what she wanted. 

      
No way. 

      
Unless she was actually losing her mind.

      “Come on then, let’s go home.” Her intention was to soothe the horses but the tremor in her voice didn’t fool either of them. 

      She started to turn them both, something she’d never quite gotten the hang of doing in tandem, when a flash of black streaked past again. Then stopped.

      
Oh, God. 

      She was panting, her breath coming out in short, sharp bursts. Riley could feel a damp, nervous sweat start to clam across her skin.  

      The animal was standing so stealthy still that it made Riley’s heart thunder to a standstill. Made her breath halt. 

      Her entire body froze.

      Riley locked eyes with an enormous wild cat. She watched the black feline, its tawny, sleek body moving only with the motion of breathing. Head on an angle. Watching. Listening. 

      Hunting?

      Riley took a deep breath. Hopefully not. Was it a leopard? A panther? Whatever it was it was huge, and looking at her horses like they were on the menu. 

      
Fuck
. 

      “It’s okay.” She tried to calm the horses again but her voice came out as a shallow whisper. “Just a cat. It’s just a cat.”

      
Only it wasn’t
. This was the kind of cat people watched on
Animal Planet.
In the comfort of their favorite sofa, not so close you could make out every quiver of its body. Every blink. Every hair across its back. Every twitch of his whiskers.

      The cat looked interested. More than just inquisitive.

      It almost looked…
like it recognized her
, which was stupid.

      But the slow building terror tickling her spine wasn’t, it was deadly accurate. And so was the dry, sandpaper itch of her throat as she tried to swallow back her fear. 

      Riley fought against the voice in her mind telling her to run and kept her eyes locked on the cat instead. She bit back at the fear, at the terror, and did her best impersonation of brave. The horses were still dancing, but she maintained her stance. As her body started to relax under her command, she was able to look at the creature without anticipating an attack. If it hadn’t happened by now, surely it wasn’t going to pounce without provocation? It didn’t look hungry, but then how the hell would she know?

      Riley gulped as the cat slowly turned, eyes dragging from hers at the last moment. It moved carefully through the trees before darting off. Out of sight. 

      Riley felt it coming before it happened. Before she even had the chance to exhale as the fear she’d been bottling fled her body. 

      Her horse reared, so high she lost the rope attached to Claudia’s. She leaned forward, kept her seat, but once they’d landed back on all four hooves again she could only watch, helpless, as her sister’s horse bolted off down the beach. 

      Damn it!

      The horse had a good head start and it would take forever to catch up with him. 

      She dug her heels in and hurtled full speed down the sand.

      If that cat decided to go for them… It could still be watching them,
waiting
. And she didn’t particularly want to be hanging around if it decided they were its best option for lunch.  

      There was no way either of her horses could out run a predator like that. She just knew it. 

      And that meant she wouldn’t stand a chance in hell either. 

Riley was still trying to fight the adrenalin hitting her nerves when she arrived back at the house. She was leading both horses. Silly, given the size of the cat she’d seen, but leading them both had seemed like the only sensible option after battling them most of the way back.

      She saw Sophia, long hair out and billowing, waiting for them on the veranda. Like she’d known they were coming back at that
exact
moment. 

      “Nice ride?” Sophia’s voice carried on the wind to them. 

      Riley scowled back. “Not really, no.”

      Sophia seemed to float down the steps. It only irritated Riley more.  

      “I see what you mean about the wildlife,” she muttered. 

      Part of her was seething. Being cool was one thing, but letting her granddaughter out on horseback with those kind of creatures hanging around seemed pretty irresponsible. Even to a seventeen-year-old.

      “I take it you saw Hunter.”

      The way Sophia smiled only made her want to snap more. Was she purposely talking in riddles? Who the hell was this bloody
Hunter
anyway? She was in no mood to chat about who she should have seen or how her ride was. What she wanted was answers about what had been stalking her out there! 

      “No, actually,” she snapped. “I saw a huge black cat…”

      “Leopard,” Sophia corrected her. “It would have been a leopard, actually.”

      Riley glared at her. “A
leopard
.” Her tongue curled with anger around the word. “Then I lost one of the horses, and managed to
somehow
get back here without being eaten.”

      “You weren’t in any danger of being
eaten
.”

      Screw this. Sophia was laughing at her like this was some sort of joke.

      Riley walked away, she had to. She was getting so angry, so close to snapping like a tightly coiled rubber band that she had to take herself away from the conversation. If she’d known there were leopards out there she would have stayed at home. She was miserable, mourning, not suicidal.

 Even if sometimes she had wished she was dead.
 

      “Once you’re done steaming,” her grandmother said with a chuckle, “I’d like you to meet someone.”

      Riley looked back at Sophia. She had to be kidding? Was she even taking her seriously?

      After a morning like she’d had, and with her head pounding like a truck was storming through it, now she had to be social?

      “No thanks.” She hadn’t wanted to show her temper but it was impossible not to sound snarky. Today had been beyond ridiculous already. 

      “He’s waiting.”

      Riley looked around and didn’t see anyone. 

      “Inside?”

      Guilt crawling through her belly at being rude mixed with disappointment. She was annoyed with Sophia, but she was her guest and she was stuck with her. There was no point getting all freaked out and in her face. 

      If he was already inside, whoever this guest was, there was no way she could get out of meeting him. 

      “He’s over by the tree there.”

      Riley followed her grandmother’s wave. She glanced toward the forest. And almost dropped the reins she held in each hand. 

      A tall guy, long legs clad in denim, head hidden by the angle of the shade falling over his face, stood. Back resting against a massive tree. 

      Riley sucked in a lungful of air as he raised one hand in greeting. She looked away, didn’t bother to return the gesture. 

      Didn’t know if it was embarrassment, pride or something else that forced her to ignore him. 

      “I need to talk to you inside first. Then you can meet Hunter.”

      
The mysterious Hunter
. She should have guessed. 

      It didn’t matter that he looked like a bronzed track athlete. She didn’t want to meet anyone. Didn’t want to pretend that everything in her world was okay. Didn’t want to have fun, not without Claudia. 

      And she didn’t particularly want to play nice when her gran had as good as fed her to the wolves by letting her go out in the forest alone. 

      But a quick glance at Sophia showed she was serious. There was no humor in her eyes, just a steely determination that Riley hadn’t seen there yesterday. And it told her that saying no wasn’t an option.  

      “Riley?”      

      She nodded. She was smart enough to know when she could win a fight, and this wasn’t looking like one of them. 

      Sophia held up her hand to this Hunter guy, gave him some sort of a signal, before he disappeared. Riley watched the slow, languid way he walked off, hands in his pockets, casual as hell. Why hadn’t he just come over? It wasn’t like she cared, but still. 

      Riley knew she looked terrible. Her hair was like straw, flat against her head from the helmet, face probably smudged from mucking around with the horses, but she hadn’t cared about how she looked in a while. Had worn her jeans, steel-toed boots and a tank every day since finding her sister, because she no longer cared enough to make an effort. 

      Making time for anything other than feeling sad just made her feel disloyal. Traitorous.  

      Although Claudia would be shaking her fist at her from up above if she even thought about meeting a guy
that
cute without at least brushing her hair. 

      A grin hit Riley’s lips. It was like Claudia had been with her then, the way they used to always be able to communicate without speaking. The whole twin-communication thing was what she missed the most. 

      Riley laughed inside, grinning to herself.
Okay
. If Claudia wanted her to tart herself up, then that’s what she’d do. 

      
For Claudia. Not for the guy. 

      If it meant she could make Claudia laugh from wherever she was, it was definitely worth making an effort. 

Riley’s grin faded as soon as she walked inside. The small bubble of happiness that she’d enjoyed gone. 

      One minute, she’d felt like her sister was sitting on her shoulder, in her mind somehow, and now it was like she’d lost her forever all over again. And Sophia was starting to drive her mad. 

      “Riley, you need to understand that I know what you’re going through.”

      Riley was sick of hearing people say that. Everyone said it.
I know what it’s like. It’ll get better. Give it time.
 

      She’d lost her twin sister, not a damn pet bird. It was never going to get any easier, and no one understood. No one. Not Sophia, not her friends, not anyone. 

      Anger bubbled in her throat, clouded her mind, but she kept her mouth shut. Talking just made it hurt more. She wasn’t going to defend herself, to try to explain it. It was easier to let it go rather than waste her energy on arguing. 

      Riley was starting to think she should have just skipped off to meet Hunter straight away when she’d had the chance. Anything would be better than this conversation. Even mumbling, trying to converse with a stranger who you had nothing in common with. At least she could have ignored him. 

      “And I know that look on your face, Riley. Like no one could possibly know what it’s like.” Sophia continued, reprimanding her, forcing her to stop and listen. 

      Okay, so she had her attention. How the hell did she think she knew any better? 

      “It’s like having one of your arms cut off but worse, because the wound never heals,” Sophia told her. “It just gets deeper, darker, until you don’t even know how you’ll be able to breathe. Like both of your lungs have collapsed, one on top of the other. You feel like you’ll never be able to claw your way back to the surface.”

      Suddenly Riley did find it hard to breathe. She sucked back air, gulping it like it was her last chance to fill her lungs.

      That was
exactly
how she felt. A lightness lifted her shoulders as she turned back to Sophia. Did she,
could she
, actually know what it was like? Who had she lost, what had happened?

      “How, I mean…”

      Sophia interrupted her, holding her hand in the air. “I lost my twin too.”

      “
What
?” How come she didn’t already know that? Why had no one told her?

      “I was the same age as you. My twin sister died of a heart condition. Or at least that’s what the formal conclusion was.”

      Riley felt like her head was a spinning top, about to fly off. What? That was exactly how Claudia had died, or what the doctor had told them anyway. 

      “So it’s a family condition then?”

      Sophia chuckled. “You could say that.”

      Anger threatened to choke her. It wasn’t something to be laughed at. Claudia was gone
forever
. There was nothing funny about that. 

      “What we have is not necessarily a condition, but you’re right, it’s inherited.”

      Riley was confused. Inherited but not a condition?  
      “But the doctor said it was a freak heart thing. That he couldn’t explain it. If it happened to your sister too…”

      “Believe me, soon you’ll be pleased a doctor can’t diagnose what we have.”

      Riley shook her head. Maybe the old woman was getting a bit senile. Didn’t know what she was saying. 

      Sophia smiled, as if to challenge her, as if she knew exactly what Riley had been thinking. As if she
wanted
to have to prove it to her.

      “We’re different, you and I, Riley,” Sophia said in a low voice. “You’re here for a reason. For a journey.”

      “I’m here because my parents don’t know what to do with me,” she snapped. “Because they’re sick of looking at me and being reminded of
her
.”

       Sophia just smiled again. Riley wished she wasn’t being so patient with her, so kind. She wanted to argue, to fight with her. Anything to get rid of what she was feeling right now. She didn’t understand. Didn’t get what Sophia was trying to tell her.  

      “Just go with Hunter. He’ll show you what you want to know. What you need to see.”

      How the hell was he going to explain some freaky family heart condition better than Sophia could? “Can we just stop talking in riddles?” She stomped her foot, feeling childish before her heel even hit the ground. “
Please
.” Her voice was husky, weak now.