The campus pathways stretched empty before Rayla, morning mist still clinging to the manicured hedges as she hurried toward the book café. With Asher pulled away by family obligations and Scarlet spending the day at Nick's ancestral home (which she'd described in texts as "like Downton Abbey but with more secret passages"), Rayla had looked forward to a rare quiet morning. Just her, a novel, and the café's infamous caramel lattes that Asher always mocked as "liquid sugar with pretensions."
Sunlight streamed through the café's leaded glass windows, painting golden stripes across the cozy armchair she'd claimed near the fiction section. For two blissful hours, she lost herself in a fantasy epic, the scent of old paper and espresso wrapping around her like a comforting blanket.
The chair op
