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I wept into my hands, so overcome with the possibility of the sea coming for me when I needed it most. That Wolfe was here—that he’d chosen me out of everyone that had ever stepped foot in Kilmorran, he’d wanted to speak to me.

I finally managed to dry my eyes, heart so full it could burst. When I lifted my head, Wolfe was already staring at me. The rest of the boat was too occupied by the whales to see me staring off into nothing, but he was there. Touching my chin. My cheek.

If I could have, I would have kissed him.

Would have gripped him by the collar and let the bravery I was feeling then and there take over. I would have let him sweep me away and ruin me for all others. He’d taste like salt air and sunshine and I’d die at the taste of his kiss.

Those red-brown eyes of his flared, nearly amber in the light.

“Don’t look at me like that,” he warned.

“Like what?” I asked breathlessly.

“Like you’d let me make you mine.” He touched my lip, that weird vibration settling deep in my bones. “Like you’d let me keep you.”

I swallowed painfully. “I would,” I murmured. “Happily.”

An anguished groan ripped from his chest. “Dia linn,” he rumbled. His forehead touched mine. “You were sent to undo me, I know it.”

I felt the same. He was waking me up, pulling me apart, suffusing my veins with sunshine and possibility. The light inside me was blazing once more and for the first time in a long time I felt…hope.

A splash echoed from my left and I remembered where I was. I tore my face away from his, choosing instead to focus on the whale not twenty feet away. One of the small boys from the family beside me stared at the exact spot Wolfe lingered and lifted his hand in a little wave.

I focused on the whales, on the cold sea water on my cheeks.

In the end, I had nearly a hundred photos and videos filling up my camera roll. When the boat headed back toward Bracken Bay, I watched the whales go with a heavy heart.

Silently, I thanked the universe and all the powers that be for such an experience.

I would never forget it as long as I lived.

Chapter 18

Wolfe

“I’d like to go see the faerie circle,” Avery announced Friday morning.

Wolfe looked up from the coffee table and their current round of a game called Scrabble. Avery explained the rules, nose scrunched up as she told him the exact instructions. He’d listened, chin propped on his fist, wondering if her hair would feel as silky as he imagined it would.

He was a fool.

A damn fool, at that.

Never had he ached for another person more. It was a festering wound. A hand closing around his throat.

Going to the faerie stones meant another burst of power, another foothold in this world. Part of him wondered if it would be worth it. To take one step closer to her but still remain so impossibly far away. Would it be fair to him? To her?

He had no heart to break, but he would find himself on the other end of a haunting. Avery’s heart, however, had seen enough. It’d been handled roughly and without thought.

He needed to be careful.

“Well?” she demanded, hands on her hips.

The journey out to see the whales changed her.

She seemed…more herself. There was a confidence there now. A gleam in her eye he hadn’t seen before. She’d greeted him this morning with a bright smile on her face. He’d done a double take at the sight of it, head whipping around to stare at the dimples on her cheeks. Avery had been here nearly a month and he could not recall ever seeing her smile so early in the morning.

Yesterday was one of the most incredible things he’d ever seen.