Is it really fake dating if he's blackmailing her into it, the whole school thinks she put a romance spell on him, and she's only there to pull off a heist?
Coming Winter 2026
Chapter One
The farthest my mom, dad and sister could escort me was the Madrid Airport baggage claim. I would’ve preferred managing our goodbyes at Shanghai, or better yet, our starting travel point, Tokyo. The longer my mom was allowed to follow me, the more likely she’d find an excuse to keep me from leaving.
Also, the goodbyes were taking forever, and I was an impatient know-it-all by nature. (I see no point in concealing my flaws. I’m right about them.)
A private security guard rolled my two suitcases toward a stretch limo. A second guard reached for my carry-on, but I shook my head. I would need it the moment I was alone. Which would hopefully be soon.
“Be prepared to be bullied,” Mom said.
“Mom’s right,” my sister Tabita murmured. “You need to be careful.”
“You won’t have friends and don’t make any,” Mom continued, squeezing my arm as we made our way to the waiting limo. “Everything that happens is part of the game for power, and every student at the school on La Hosca is a game player. They will come after you. You think you’ll be able to stop them, but you won’t. If the bullying gets excessive go to one of the older NoMa instructors. Stay as far from the Headmistress as possible. She’s the worst bully of all, and—”
“I know.” I muttered to myself, the limo, and the universe around us. At this rate, I wouldn’t arrive at La Hosca until I was twenty years too old for a private boarding school. And if I hadn’t picked up on Mom’s worries the first time she’d mentioned them nine weeks and several countries ago, I was unlikely to do so now.
“Isa knows,” Tabby agreed in her soft, lilting voice and patted Mom on the arm.
Carrots: We all know! ... The headmistress is evil! ... I’m evil too! ... I can’t wait to meet her!
“Shut up,” I growled to the voice in my head.
A tiny claw pin-pricked my left shoulder. I glared that direction even though the mouse-sized dragon who’d done it was currently invisible. As was the dragon on my right shoulder.
“Isa,” my dad said with a full dose of disappointment in his voice, “Don’t talk to your mother and sister that way.”
Grrr... I hadn’t meant to speak out loud
My chatty stow-aways were a mafioso level secret, especially from my family.
Peas: Apologize to your mother immediately ... We are not mean to our mothers
Me: I was talking to the two of you ... Stop distracting me ... It’s hard to have multiple conversations going at once ... And you don’t have a mother
Peas: Apologize ... Apologize ... Apologize!!!
I winced at the volume in my head.
“Sorry, Mom.”
Tropes
Playlist
Purchase
Second Chance
Bad Boy / Good Girl
Can't get over each other
Solve the mystery or he gets blamed
Everything that can go wrong does
Obnoxious Dragons who pick sides
Magical Mayhem
Humor!!!!
'Human' by The Killers*
'Just Another Girl' by the Killers
'A Certain Romance' by Arctic Monkey
'Poison' by Alice Cooper
'Dear Agony' by Breaking Benjamin
"Barely Breathing' by From Ashes to New
'Scars' by Papa Roach
'Steady as She Goes' by the Raconteurs
*The Song I was listening to while hiking when the entire middle of the book just appeared like a movie in my head.
Ummm.... This is getting a little long. Here's a link to my full (and way...too...big) Partridge Playlist.
$14.99 Print Book
$4.99 EBook
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Since I couldn’t bolt, I froze. So did time and the world as all my emotions, thoughts, and sense-of-self drained into a horrified puddle under the table.
Slade scanned the room, eyes narrowed, expression flat. Which didn’t mean he was mad yet as he hadn’t noticed me. It was just his usual expression.
As I watched him, my alarm morphed into something different. Something fascinated.
It’d been so long, and there he was. Oh. So. Familiar. And yet different at the same time.
The noise of the restaurant dissipated into a background hum, and the others at the table faded. My breath slipped out in a wistful sigh. I leaned forward on the table, knocking more of the shredded napkin into my lap.
Even with his painful-like-stabbing-my-own-chest-with-a-knife hatred between us, I’d missed him. Really, really missed him.
He was still slender, but his shoulders were wider than I remembered. He’d shaved the sides of his dark hair short, almost buzzed, but the top was longer, falling to one side in a thick, messy curtain. His face was still straight lines and angles with high cheekbones, but that was fuller too. He’d become more of…well…himself. Beautiful and compelling in a never-smiles, furrowed-brows, blank-stare kind of way.
He was dressed in a long-sleeved tee for a band named Earth Crisis, ripped jeans, battered Chucks, and had a dozen or so black leather bracelets around his right wrist.
Slade’s attention settled on me. Hurt flashed through his eyes followed by the entire list of synonyms for hate plus all related verbs. His frown turned into a curled-lip sneer, his eyes narrowed into lasers of loathing. He folded his arms. I gulped back a bone-deep apprehension mixed with a longing for things to be different and a heavy, drowning sadness for what I’d lost.
The Reunion
