Chosen by Ella James Read Free Book Online

started to ask the same thing.
     “They want to run a background check,” Carlin supplied; her brow furrowed. “I think I’ve heard of this place. It’s supposed to be…high class?”
    “Well high-class or not, it could take up to an hour,” Meredith said.
    Julia shook her head. “There’s no way they can run a background check in an hour.” Background checks were a normal part of life in the foster system—for foster parents. Even considering that the system’s check was more exhaustive, an hour was way too short.
    Julia explained this, but her friends just looked at her with blank expressions. “Maybe they have a computer program,” Drew said.
    “That can look us up from just our names?”
    His shrugged; clearly he did not understand the tubes.
    Neither did Cayne, who said, “I’d bet none of you have much of a background anyway.”
    “I’ve been off the radar since I was a baby,” Drew said.
    “I say we just give them our names,” Meredith said. “The worst they can do is tell us no.”
    “I think this is a waste of time,” Julia said. “We need to keep moving. I don’t know how many resorts this country has, but if you guys have to keep coming back to this one, we’ll never find the right one. I can just hide in the car.”
    “You’re not thinking defensively,” Cayne said, his stern voice driving Julia batty—in a bad way.
    “I’m not thinking like you ,” she snapped. “And I don’t have to. I’m the one who’s The One. It’s my life that’s in danger. And if I want to stay in the van I should get to stay in the damn van!”
    There was a beat of silence, during which Cayne’s hard eyes bored into hers in the rear view mirror, and then softened. “It’s not just yours,” he said softly.
    Julia’s stomach clenched, all her insides feeling weird and tender, like she might turn into a glob of goo; she clenched her sweaty palms, rendered temporarily mute.
    Drew shifted uncomfortably in his seat, while Edan banged some rhythm on his knees and stared out the fogged window.
    Finally, Meredith decided. “Let’s just try it. If it doesn’t work, we move along.”
    “Try it,” Carlin nodded, but Julia wasn’t even thinking about that anymore.
    Cayne’s face had lost that desperate look and gone back to something closer to his usual composure, but she could still feel something raw emanating from him.
    She was suddenly irritated that the others were with them—Edan, Carlin, Drew, even Meredith. She wanted to be alone with Cayne, lie beside him on a bed, behind closed doors, to touch his face and talk. Find out when he’d gotten quite so worried.
    Meredith clapped, interrupting Julia’s thoughts. “They said if we’re under 21, no background check, but if we don’t have driver’s licenses, we need to submit our names and home addresses.”
    The next few minutes were spent passing around a ragged little notebook they’d found inside the glove box, while each one of them jotted down their info, plus the few local addresses Julia knew by heart from Memphis. Drew recorded Dirk and Dwight’s addy and passed the notebook to Cayne, and Julia, leaning up between the two front seats, watched as he wrote in beautiful, tidy print. Her eyes were expecting a “C,” so when she saw a “S,” she balked. Somairhle Mochridhe.
    “Um…huh?”
    Cayne passed the notebook to her, and she stared at the two words for a few more seconds. “This is your name?”
    He nodded, and Julia had to bite her tongue. Her first thought—one of irritation: just another thing she hadn’t known. Her second: This was personal to him. So personal. She couldn’t bring it up in front of everybody else. Julia jotted her full name, but not her real address—she used the community center four blocks away.
    When Meredith glanced over the notepad, she said, “Seriously Edan?”
    He smirked, then shrugged.
    “Cayne? How the heck do you pronounce this, and why doesn’t it say ‘Cayne’?”
    He pronounced