Fading Embers The Search for Lost Love
/1/129726/coverbig.jpg?v=d952b45e9b05aae9f5803a8b2c8d4fc6)
The Hockey Prince's Secret Ice Queen
All I wanted was to find a computer genius to process the non-linear dynamic equations for my ecological model. Instead, I found myself cornered by Julian Andrews, the university's hockey prince, trading a public, staged kiss for his academic support. To finalize our "deal," I was dragged to the campus ice rink. The cheerleaders and puck bunnies immediately swarmed him, mocking my plain clothes and treating me like a pathetic joke. Brooke, the head cheerleader, even set up a figure skating competition with a date with Julian as the grand prize. She performed a basic spin, blew him a kiss, and smugly waited for me to fall flat on my face and humiliate myself. His hockey teammates laughed from the sidelines, watching me try to support Julian as he stumbled around the ice like a newborn giraffe. But as I held his warm hand to keep him from falling, I couldn't help but feel something was terribly wrong. Why was a top-tier athlete faking such awful balance? And why did his ice-blue eyes stare at me with such knowing anticipation, as if he already knew about the professional figure skating past I had spent years trying to bury? "Just let go and skate." He whispered, slowly releasing my hand. I took a deep breath, glided to the center of the rink, and landed a flawless double Axel. As the entire rink fell into a dead, shocked silence, I realized I had just exposed not only my own hidden past, but also the biggest secret of the campus god.
Chapter 1 No.1
Sage POV:
"Let me kiss you."
The request was a low, hurried murmur—warm, quiet, and laced with the faintest edge of mortification.
Stunned, I snapped my head up toward the sound.
Julian Andrews filled my vision. He easily towered a head over me, his lean, athletic frame silhouetted against the bright morning glare, casting a long shadow across the cobblestones. Briar University's star forward. Team captain. The athletic department's untouchable golden boy.
Campus rumor had it that Julian was notoriously indifferent, never sparing anyone a second glance.
Behind him, a solid wall of navy-and-gold varsity jackets blocked the brick path. His teammates were whistling, shoving each other, and effectively cutting off my only exit.
The sudden commotion immediately bottlenecked the morning foot traffic. Whispers rippled through the crowd, and within seconds, a dozen students reached into their pockets out of sheer muscle memory, black camera lenses catching the light as they aimed squarely at us.
Julian's sharp eyes tracked the movement, his jaw tightening into a hard, irritated line.
Before I could take a single defensive step back, he closed the distance between us. Leaning down into my space, his broad shoulders shifted in a subtle, fluid maneuver—throwing up an impenetrable physical wall that completely shielded my face from the intrusive glare of the cameras.
His sharp, striking face hovered breathtakingly close. His deep baritone brushed against my ear, lost to the autumn wind, meant for me alone:
"Sorry to drop this on you," he whispered, his pale blue eyes disarmingly earnest, holding a quiet heat that sent a tremor straight down my spine. "The guys backed me into a locker-room dare... but I'm not here to use you as a joke. We can fake it. Angle it so it looks real—whatever you're comfortable with. Just help me get them off my back, and I owe you one."
It was only then that my brain finally rebooted.
What on earth? He's actually trying to kiss me?
A sharp flare of pure absurdity hit me, and my gaze dropped to my reflection in the dark glass door of the adjacent building: an oversized, faded gray hoodie that swallowed my frame whole, soft, thin jeans worn at the knees, bare-faced dark circles carved beneath my eyes from forty-eight hours of non-stop coding, my dark hair hastily twisted into a cheap plastic claw clip, and a pair of oversized, thick black-rimmed glasses sitting heavy on the bridge of my nose, completely hiding my face.
I looked like a refugee from an all-night disaster. How had Briar's golden prince ended up in front of me?
When I looked back up, my breath trapped in my throat anyway. He was too close, his clean scent of winter mint and cedar wrapping around my senses. Having those pale blue eyes staring straight down at me made my chest tighten in a way I really didn't want to acknowledge.
"Clock's ticking, Cap!" Landon howled from the sidelines, hands cupped around his mouth as the rest of the players lost their minds laughing. "Plant one on her, or enjoy the five-AM bag skate!"
A raucous chorus of barks and chest-thumping went up from the team.
A few yards away, two girls heading toward the dining hall froze in their tracks, pointing their phones.
"Wait, who the hell is that?" one of them laughed loudly, zooming her camera in on my face. "She looks like she just crawled out of a dumpster. There's no way Julian's actually kissing her. Post it on Sidechat right now—this is going straight to number one."
The cruel words hit like a splash of ice water, snapping me out of my daze and instantly killing the stupid flutter in my chest.
I hated the attention.
Four years ago, after my family and my former training partner framed me and destroyed my competitive skating career, I swore I would never be public entertainment again. I buried my name, switched majors, and hid behind oversized fleece and thick glasses just to live an invisible life. If I ended up on the campus forums with Julian Andrews, the internet vultures would dox me before noon—and drag up the toxic scandal I had bled to walk away from.
My research was already on the verge of falling apart. I didn't have time for this circus.
I locked my grip around my heavy binders, my knuckles straining white.
"Find someone else for your dare, Andrews," I said coldly, taking a step back to put distance between us, my voice tight with adrenaline. "I'm not interested in being part of your game. Move."
I kept my head down, attempting to brush past him.
"You're Sage Kelley, right?"
The sound of my name brought my boots to an immediate halt.
I blinked up at him, caught completely off guard.
"Professor Beaumont's senior research student," Julian straightened up slightly, his cadence measured and even, carrying an intellectual sharpness that seemed impossible beneath a varsity jacket. "I saw your Havenwood Creek senior capstone proposal sitting on his desk over Sunday dinner."
My heart gave a hard, hollow thud. Professor Beaumont was my academic advisor—and the guardian of the final research endowment my late father had left behind.
Julian leaned in slightly, his voice dropping to a near-whisper against the whistle of the wind. "I spent an hour going over your codebase."
My lips parted. "You... read my proposal?"
"Your simulation keeps crashing because your core fluid algorithm strategy is flawed," Julian murmured, his pale blue eyes deadly sharp. "And Uncle Des mentioned that if you don't deliver a working version by this Friday, the department is pulling your grant—which means you don't clear your senior thesis, and you don't graduate in May."
The hair on the back of my neck stood on end.
Friday was the deadline. If the funding was pulled, the project died, my senior capstone failed, and I would be forced to stay another semester without my degree. Worse, my father's final ecological legacy would be reduced to scrap paper.
I had been panicking over that exact deadline for two days straight, and Julian had just laid it out like it was nothing.
Worse, I couldn't even brush him off. I had heard the rumors about Beaumont's nephew—the CS prodigy everyone in the department talked about. I just had never realized it was him.
"I know how to fix your algorithm," Julian stated plainly, laying his cards on the table, his gaze locking onto mine with an unshakeable, quiet certainty. "Help me get through this bet. In return, I'll rewrite your boundary calculations tonight. Deal?"
/0/57687/coverbig.jpg?v=f0113ee83784e8062a5a38427e31a881)
Fading Embers: The Search for Lost Love
When Ranya calmly announces Vivian’s return, it marks the abrupt end of Calista and Ryan’s relationship. Three years of convenience fade as he chooses Vivian over her. She gracefully accepts the end of their arrangement with a brief response, parting ways with the compensation he provided. Leaving T
/0/86733/coverbig.jpg?v=0527c8a0806a5948ce3ad29fa75d1295)
Love Lost, Life Fading
Ava Jenkins stared at her reflection in the darkened bus window, a stranger looking back. Her fiery red hair and loud clothes screamed for attention, but inside, she carried a secret heavier than a brick: Idiopathic Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension. Her heart was failing, and there was no cure. She j
/0/40820/coverbig.jpg?v=8129e08c5be673a953fc32d0071ef17d)
The search for the lost city
Chapter I The sun was beating down on the dusty plains of the Sahara desert. A group of adventurers trudged through the sand, their faces covered in scarves to protect them from the relentless heat. They were on a mission to find the lost city of Zerzura, a fabled place said to be filled with treas
/0/43128/coverbig.jpg?v=0cc29de59aaa09330f55760144540bc5)
Lost For Love
* Blurb: He picked up his call, "Hello Wilfred, this is unlike you, what's going on?" Eduardo asked. "Sir, Cindy is in the hospital, you need to come immediately." "What happened?... In which hospital?" Eduardo asked. Eduardo knew something wasn't right, Mr Wilfred can't just call him, if it was a
/0/45086/coverbig.jpg?v=46c13cd6a5ae7aa7ef62826b2a62fa70)
The Search for Freedom
Lil Ward was given a task by an old man named Cain. His mission was to eradicate a hundred wicked people in the world. He realized that killing people was an unjust thing itself, but though he didn't want to kill, he could not control his power that was forcing him to commit the heinous crime. Lil
/0/58067/coverbig.jpg?v=91aff9193ac45676f9e6e36dd4a62d7b)
Search for my Luna
Claire RavenWood has been gifted with the blood of the sacred Luna, which only has one occurrence in a century. Ever since the news broke that the Luna had been born, Claire was all but safe. The past Lunas’ barely survived and because of that, the blood ran dry and there were none for thousands of
/0/87962/coverbig.jpg?v=68e76d72a208225d2607e15320e9e1bf)
Five Years, A Fading Love
For five years, I was Grafton Mcleod's shadow. I wasn't just his assistant; I was his alibi, his shield, the one who cleaned up his messes. Everyone thought I was in love with him. They were wrong. I did it all for his brother, Justen—the man I truly loved, who made me promise on his deathbed to loo
/0/16836/coverbig.jpg?v=186f26aa6212c49803a1e85574d24080)
/0/38546/coverbig.jpg?v=94cb3a49d8cf44a31796aff4f4048580)
In search of love
Synopsis. Cynthia is a slut, or at least that's what you would call her when you see her at different hotels every night. But it goes beyond that. After growing up with a mother who had a new husband every season, Cynthia concluded to never be committed to one man. She wasn't interested in
/0/72601/coverbig.jpg?v=826938fa2d6147a359ff89b8580da6c0)
The Love we lost
She met him when she least expected during a time when her only focus was to get into college. It was an instant connection. Although it was silence at first but it grew into something more. Late night drives and stolen kisses but love was never enough. She has a past she struggles to let go of, an
/0/94203/coverbig.jpg?v=6b87dea8add46a967d2b707890d6885a)
A Ghost's Vengeance For Lost Love
My family stormed into my apartment, not to celebrate my prestigious science award, but to drag me to my influencer sister' s party. They didn' t know that just downstairs, I was bleeding out on the cold basement floor after an attack. With my last breath, I called for help. My brother texted me t
/0/52241/coverbig.jpg?v=41592654530b2199a7f7679c99c65985)
LOST LOVE, FOUND LOVE
This is a high school love story about Amberlynn a girl who is from a Christian home and decided to go contray to her parents counsels against teenage intimate relationship with the opposite gender. On her first day in school,she had a huge crush on high schools demi god. They hit off together wi
/0/18212/coverbig.jpg?v=fcc6e05b0301f123baedd93bb9b00677)
Love Lost
This story is a soft-core yaoi/slice of life about Haru, a boy aged 17, living in boarding school where he meets his new friends. Weak both mentally and physically, he finds new strength when he meets Aubrey, a carefree and confident boy whom he falls in love with. But Haru is too afraid to admit hi
/0/9232/coverbig.jpg?v=49eeb044e0e81cfaf8c38ad7361bd7b4)
The Rover Boys out West; Or, The Search for a Lost Mine
Excerpt: ...speeches, Dick,\" cried the younger brother half angrily. \"Boil it down and serve the extract in short order.\" \"Very well, I will. Firstly, Arnold Baxter is in jail. Secondly, he states his friends are going to ask the governor for a pardon. Thirdly, a friend in disguise comes to the
/0/57486/coverbig.jpg?v=0a51c86a9de1d568da98e0ff0905e64a)
Tangled Embers
A passionate one night stand with a troubled billionaire heir Karl Martinez soon changed the trajectory of Zena's dysfunctional life when their part cross again. This time subconsciously igniting fire in Zena as she falls head over heels for Karl, against her will. She struggles to navigate the com
/0/69636/coverbig.jpg?v=8129e08c5be673a953fc32d0071ef17d)
Fading Memories
When Ronan accidentally texts her ex-boyfriend Gideon to assemble her bed, she doesn't expect him to show up-or to reignite old sparks in the most awkward of ways. But between steamy misunderstandings, mischievous matchmaking, and a very suspicious medical intern named Tobias, Gideon begins to suspe
/0/86657/coverbig.jpg?v=017aef2922e444b3cf93d47697e90496)
The Betrayal: A Love Lost
I was Mark Thompson' s secret, his adoptive niece, and his hidden lover for three years. He took me in when I had nowhere else to go, becoming my protector and hero. Then, two pink lines on a pregnancy test changed everything. I went to tell him, hoping this baby would make our relationship real, o
/0/86790/coverbig.jpg?v=777d5b4ce0884e83816f1ae67114e0b0)
The Final Cut: Love Lost
Ethan Miller, a game developer, was lost in his pixelated world until his fiancée, Chloe, shattered it. He watched online as she flaunted herself with billionaire Julian Harrison, a man old enough to be her father, wearing a sapphire bracelet he couldn't afford. Chloe's merciless abandonment follow
