Page 14 of Offside Possession

I’d find my troublemaker.

Might not be today, but I would find her.

CHAPTER 7

STELLA

Regret was a bitch.

Living the way I lived, regret was something I strived never to feel. Yet, slipping out of my tall, dark, and handsome stranger’s bed, I felt it. Unequivocally, down to my toes, I regretted it. It felt wrong in every sense of the word.

“I should have left him a note,” I mumbled into my cell phone.

“Wait, you just… left? Just… like that?” she asked. I nodded even though I knew she couldn’t see me.

“We had rules,” I reminded her after telling her most of the story.

“You break the rules all the time!” Rainy said, and I laughed because I’d known that was what she was going to say.

“It doesn’t matter.” I sighed. I was full of shit. “He was…”

“What?” Rainy asked. I sighed.

“Too good to be true.” The words slipped past my lips way too easily, but I couldn’t get myself to take them back. Not when they felt so real. So honest.

“Too good to be… Wait, who are you, and what did you do to my no-strings=attached little sister? Because this sounds like maybe you want a lot more than just another spin around the Ferris wheel, if you know what I mean.”

“I’m still me. I just…” I chewed on my bottom lip, looking out the city as my Uber drove to the restaurant where I was supposed to meet Sam’s friend. “I just… I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“I mean, I do. He was great and sweet and funny, and I just…” I couldn’t wipe the smile off my face. I was smitten. No, I was more than smitten. Shit, am I in love?

“Why don’t you go back?”

“What?” I asked, because the L-word was stuck in my head.

“Go back to his place, tell him you want to exchange info and maybe see him again?”

“I can’t do that!” I gaped. “He will think I am some weirdo, stalker girl.”

“Hey, he might like that,” she teased, but I didn’t make a sound. “Okay, kidding. But, babe, you’ve never cared what anyone thought about you. Why are you going to start now?”

“I mean…” She had a point. “But I have to meet Sam’s friend.”

“Ugh, Sam! I love our big bro, but he’s a little much sometimes.” I smirked because I knew exactly where this was going.

“Let me guess. He’s trying to hook you up?”

“No,” she said with a tinge of ick in her voice. I frowned. I was wrong? “He’s trying to talk me out of going to San Diego next month.”

“But isn’t that for work?” My sister worked for the school district. She used to teach but headed onto the administrative side of things a couple of years back and had become a badass thanks to her big brain and workaholic tendencies. Where I believed in the universe speaking to me in different ways, my sister was very much black and white with very little gray in between, not to mention a huge stickler for rules.

“Exactly! He’s too overbearing for words. Joke’s on him because my flight’s booked for that and for a little trip to Vegas for the weekend after.” Rainy might like rules and regulations and getting through red tape, but she loved letting her hair down in a place where no one would know her.

“Vegas, huh?” That warm prickling feeling flushed through me, the same one I had felt before walking into the bar. The same one that always alerted me that something big was going to happen. “You should gamble,” I blurted.

“Let me guess… this your psychic abilities again?”