Free Caught in the Surf by Jasinda Wilder

Kailani Kekoa groaned into the pillow of her sweat-slick arms and wished she could pass out again. Unfortunately, now that consciousness seemed to have gotten a hold on her, it was refusing to let go. The problem with being awake, especially at that particular moment, was that it included not just the ever-present heartache, but a whole new kind of awfulness that Lani hadn’t experienced in quite some time.
    She was hungover. Or, actually, if the persistent wavering and blurring of the world past her squinting eyelids was any indication, she was still drunk. Still really, really drunk.  
    The first order of business was to sit up. She could do this. Seriously. If she could ride the barrel of a thirty-foot swell with one arm in a bag-wrapped cast and win a national championship in the process, then surely she could manage to lever herself upright.  
    Oh, god. That hurt. Movement, even twisting her head slightly, sent lances of pain shooting through her skull. Once she was upright at last, the next order of business was to figure out where she was, and why.
    Maybe finding out when she was would be an even better place to start. Lani peered blearily around her: rows of cracked plastic chairs bolted to threadbare carpeting, an abandoned podium bearing the logo of an airline she’d never even heard of, dirty floor-to-ceiling windows. Darkness hung thick and impenetrable beyond those windows.  
    Something niggled in the back of Lani’s brain. The darkness boded ill, somehow. It shouldn’t be dark out. But why not?
    Digging in the purse at her feet, Lani withdrew her cell phone and pressed the “home” button to bring up the screensaver and the clock. 9:40 p.m.  
    9:40 p.m.?  
    Awareness filtered into her throbbing head and then struck like lightning, and was accompanied by a blistering bolt of actual lightning from outside, followed by a crack of thunder so loud and so close it rattled the windows.  
    Her connecting flight had been at 6:15 p.m., and had been the last plane out of this godforsaken postage stamp of an airport until the following day. And by godforsaken, she meant totally remote. Miles and miles from anything, anywhere—that kind of remote. No hotels, no bars, nothing. Just a single-strip runway a stone’s throw from the Pacific Ocean, a glass-walled hut containing a ticket counter, a single row of chairs that had probably been ancient in the seventies, and a four-foot-long slab of sticky laminate counter in the farthest corner of the lounge area, behind which had been a tired, silent, well-used sort of woman with pale dishwater-blonde hair and lonely, exhausted brown eyes. The woman hadn’t said a word, but she’d served Lani enough mai tais render her unconscious. And, considering Lani’s diminutive size, it had taken a shocking amount rum to do so.  
    Shit.
    Now she was stuck here in this hell-hole of an airport until morning. And she appeared to be completely alone. As in, all the lights had been turned off. As in, even the runway lights had been turned off.  
    Shit.
    Lani stuffed the cell phone back into her purse, stuffed the purse in turn into her backpack, and stood up. Which might have been a mistake, since she swayed like a hurricane-blown palm tree and then fell back onto the chair. Which hurt, a lot. All this, of course, only made her head throb even worse.  
    Lani let a pained “fuck me” slip out of her mouth, stood up more carefully, and this time stayed standing. Her backpack made it onto her shoulders without mishap, and she even managed a dozen steps in a straight line toward the bar before she stumbled. The bar was empty, of course, but there was a stack of rocks glasses on a web of black rubber behind the counter, and a soda gun. Lani reached over the bar, snagged a rocks glass and poured water into it, drank, and then filled it again. She repeated this procedure about six more times, at which point her mouth no longer contained balls of cotton, but her stomach was rebelling