Second Draft

Chapter 1

Thursday morning. Denver International Airport.

In transit—between flights and between lives.

Emma stood frozen in the airport corridor, passport in one hand, carry-on in the other. She’d felt the July heat rising as she stepped off her first flight, but in here the air was blissfully cool.

The airport brimmed with low-key morning mayhem. Stressed businessmen and parents juggling screaming toddlers flowed around her.

Emma didn’t notice.

She was busy staring at the most beautiful man in the world.

Darren Cole looked back at her. Impossibly dark eyes, velvet-soft yet edged with danger. Thick black hair, just long enough to curl around his ears. Wearing . . .

Well, some kind of body-armor spacesuit, she supposed?

The poster was the size of a small truck. Darren’s face loomed large, flanked by his three Darkreach costars.

Season three, streaming now.

Emma sighed.

He was going to be at San Diego Comic-Con. So would she, in just a few hours.

Even the thought of breathing the same air as him turned her insides to cotton candy. It was hard for her to wrap her head around the prospect that she might actually see him in real life. And not even on a stage, but maybe somewhere in the backstage area.

Because she wasn’t just attending—she was part of the event. Invited as a panelist.

Her publisher called it a career-defining moment. An arena big enough to take her from promising debut to one of the major names in her genre if she played it right.

Emma herself mostly just found it terrifying. And that was before she even let herself think about the actual panel.

The idea of walking around backstage, brushing shoulders with real-life movie stars, wasn’t comforting either. Including Darren Cole.

A long shot, sure. SDCC was an enormous event. And someone like Darren probably had handlers orbiting him like drones, keeping the mortals at bay.

Not that she’d ever dare approach him, anyway. She’d be more likely to make a Chewbacca noise than form a coherent sentence. Because what could you possibly say to someone you’d had a low-key celebrity crush on for almost a decade?

But maybe just crossing paths in a corridor. Those intense, too-perceptive eyes catching hers. One heartbeat of connection, a lifetime of unspoken possibilities. Never lived, all the sweeter for it. Gone in an instant.

Fleeting. Perfect. Safe.

Her lips softened into a dreamy smile. The world around her was a blur—though the brutal sleep deprivation might have helped with that part.

She’d gotten up at are-you-kidding-me o’clock to catch her first leg out of Minneapolis, and the two flat whites she’d basically inhaled didn’t seem to have kicked in.

“Excuse me . . . are you Emma Whitehart?”

She blinked, spinning around.

A tall, blond man stood behind her, sporty in a skiing-and-sailing kind of way. Emma tried to hide her confusion. He’d recognized her?

Even after a whirlwind few months of attention, she still wasn’t used to being approached by fans—and this man wasn’t exactly her core target group. But sure, romantasy readers came in all shapes and sizes. She wasn’t one to judge.

“Yes, I am,” she said briskly, summoning the practiced smile her PR manager, Leah, had dubbed her “nerdy cheerleader” smile.

The man was quite handsome, she supposed, though it was hard to tell when she’d just spent a full few minutes looking at Darren Cole.

He held out a slip of paper. Emma’s brain lagged, then caught up.

“Oh, of course.” She fumbled in her purse for a pen.

The Darren daydream still clung to her, vivid as ever. Downside of a writer’s imagination: it frequently hijacked reality. Upside: useful for the whole bestselling-author thing.

“Do you want something personalized or just an autograph?” she asked, finally having produced a pen from the chaos-dimension at the bottom of her bag.

His grin turned confused, brow furrowing. “No. I think this is yours. You dropped your ticket.”

She stared at him, mouth opening and closing like a fish. An embarrassed fish, with blazing cheeks.

Terrible metaphor.

“Oh. Right. Thanks,” she managed, grabbing the boarding pass.

A shade of amusement crossed his face. “Why? Are you famous?”

“Uh, no,” she said, crinkling her nose. “Or well, maybe a little. I write books and . . . stuff.”

And stuff? The only thing she wanted to write right now was an escape plan.

“Well, thanks for finding the ticket,” she added quickly, darting away down the hallway.

“Anything I might have heard—” he began.

In response, Emma just gave an awkward wave over her shoulder. She was far too flustered to stay and tell this stranger about The Bonds of Light, her debut novel and unexpected breakout success.

Besides, her gut feeling had probably been right. He didn’t look like the type to appreciate the appeal of a fantasy world swallowed by darkness. Of her fearless heroine, Catlyn, who sold her soul to bargain for light.

And of Lucen, the powerful light wielder who controlled Catlyn’s fate—dangerous, magnetic, impossible to resist. Lucen, who happened to look exactly like . . .

Nope.

Escape had definitely been the sensible choice.

Emma wove through the morning travelers, as security messages and final calls crackled overhead. She kept her head down, trying to shove the whole thing out of her mind.

Mortification—what a lovely way to kick off her allegedly glamorous Comic-Con weekend.

Well, that was reality, she supposed. Not smoldering eyes and slow-burn connection. Just offbeat encounters and soft-core cringe.

No wonder she preferred books.