The Fates (Book I) - 2014 Watty Award Winner!

4.3 - The Waking Dream

Sure, she could write a review of this ritzy hotel’s hoity-toity rooftop restaurant. But it wouldn’t be included in the travel guide; the target audience fell on the low end of the scale from rich to broke.

Shouldn’t be here. Shouldn’t be here. Every voice in Cloe’s head chanted against her presence in this place, as she started toward the elevators, head lowered to slip past all the rich guests by the reception desk with their designer luggage. What the fuck was she doing here.

“Hey…!”

She raised her gaze up from the glossy floor and stared into a bay of blue.

Oh holy everything. What the fuck was he doing here?

Cloe didn’t even care. She didn’t even… couldn’t even… He was here. That made everything else disappear.

“…hey,” she managed to murmur despite her lost mind.

This couldn’t be healthy, losing her mind like this so often lately. Ever since Commencement Day, when she’d first met this man of marble. Nothing in her life had seemed real ever since, really. She was living as if in a myth. A story she’d written or dreamt long ago…

Yet if so, somehow it seemed the truest story ever told.

He was smiling. That same slight smile, upon those roseate lips. “The campion girl,” he greeted her.

She mirrored the soft smile, cool and collected. To hide the effect his voice had on her heartbeat. “Cloe,” she introduced herself, not expecting the next words out of her own mouth. “So you’ve followed me across the world?”

Flirtatious, much? Where had that come from, she inwardly wondered. She’d almost sounded confident. As if she weren’t aflutter and afire here in front of him. It felt as though the fire, however torridly it burned, was tempered by the bay-blue streaming straight into her soul—bringing her into perfect balance in his presence.

There was something so unspeakably… natural between them, like she’d known him all her life. Or even longer.

The man of marble grinned. “You caught me,” he playfully ceded, extending his right hand in greeting. “Ryder.”

She extended her own. It wasn’t the first time their two hands had touched. But it may as well have been. The first, the last, the only time that mattered. Every time.

Cloe cleared her throat, knowing she couldn’t clear her mind. “Checking in?” she queried, noting his bulky black rollaway.

He nodded. “Are you staying here, too?”

“No, I’m just…” her voice trailed, “…meeting someone for dinner.”

The words brought Eldor instantly to mind, of course. As soon as she’d set eyes on Ryder, the epic hero had completely vanished from her thoughts. And her heart broke, the moment she mentioned the date. As though she somehow owed it to this man of marble, this virtual stranger, not to be dining with another guy tonight.

Was she legitimately going loony? How could she feel such things, feelings that made no iota of sense? What was she on?? She had to be on something strong, on something very…

Oh. Her hammering heart suddenly stilled, at what she only just now noticed—a metallic glint upon his left ring finger.

She could have sworn that it hadn’t been there, when she had met him by the gates. Could have sworn that his hand had been bare, when it’d brushed hers to pass the campion. She was nearly sure of it. Or had she been so blind, so numb to everything that moment in the garden, so caught up in the myth, the waking dream…?