Page 59 of The Last Love Story

I flush, brushing away the tingles with a hand that plucks along my collarbone. “You want to know how our story ends?” I rasp back. My voice doesn’t sound familiar.

His lips quirk as he drapes my hand over the nape of his neck, and even underneath my glove, I can feel the heat of his skin. “Or at least this chapter.”

“What do you think happens next?” I ask.

“That depends,” he says. “What do you want to happen next?” And then he’s ducking his head, just a little, so the distance between us—between our lips—shrinks.

“You can get in now,” comes a voice, and Callum jerks back, his cheeks pinking, and not from the cold. As the black-suited figure stomps by, I turn to him and he offers me a wry smile.

My heart squeezes again. We may be fake fiancés, but maybe not everything about it is fake.

“Ladies first?” He extends a palm to help me into the raised vehicle.

I step up, just as something clonks against my knee. I watch in horror as my poker chip goes bouncing from my pocket—when did I put it in my pocket?—down the tarmac, rolling away.

“You dropped something,” Callum says. It’s foolish, but I can’t leave it here, on some airfield a few miles outside New Washington. Even though I can’t explain to Callum what it means. He doesn’t require explanation, though. We both race after it.

It’s then that the hovercar explodes behind us.

Red and blue lights.

Red and blue lights.

Red and purple lights—no, that’s wrong.Submit Issue.Alba needs to correct it.

Oxygen mask.

Red and blue lights.

I blink as the world returns from pixels, my eyes burning as the ball of flame devours the place where Callum and I were just standing, touching, and—I think—almost kissing. The firefighting drones descend, jets of water streaming from their bellies. If I let my vision blur, they look like moths crowding a bonfire.

What’s real? The press descended, also drawn to the fire, and maybe they were closer than I thought. Maybe they saw the almost-kiss. Maybe Callum knew—

We almost died. If I hadn’t gone after that stupid poker chip... and now it’s gone. Probably forever. I blink three times fast, trying to stop the buzzing in my ears. My ears are ringing, and they have been since the blast.

Ripley, his voice says. It sounds like we’re underwater.

I turn to look at Callum. He has a blanket over his shoulders, eyes dark with worry. Ash is smeared on his cheekbones, perfectly highlighting his bone structure like painted-on contour from a glam squad. Even now, he’s so beautiful it hurts.

You’re in shock, the still-working part of my brain says.

A paramedic pulls at my face and puts some sort of cream on my eyebrow. It stings. Slowly, the chaos around me comes into focus. Security bustles while other Hammers keep the crowd far enough away from the flames, but they can’t stop the zoom of their cameras.

Callum sits next to me, and when his hand finds mine, it’s the most natural feeling in the world.

We both sit on the back of that ambulance as fire devours the hovercar into a matte black exoskeleton curled in on itself.

Across the way, they’re talking into their cameras about malfunctions in the wiring and overheating engines—but there’s a hitch in the words. The car wasn’t even on. Engines don’t explode when they’re turned off. I’m no engineer, but even I know what happened.

So does Callum.

Someone just tried to kill us.

Chapter 14

By the time we’re cleared to leave, it’s late. They don’t let me ride back with Callum—he’s hustled away first into a sleek jet. They let me wait for another hovercar, which should scare me. But I can’t find the energy to do anything but follow the hands pressing me on board, pushing my head down between my legs. They taught us this position during bomb drills at school. Brace.

When I finally stumble in the door to my new bedroom, all I want to do is fall into my bed, but a feeling of wrongness jolts through me. I turn the light on, trying to place the feeling, knowing that someone has been in my room, someone has donesomething.