Copyright © 2022 by Torri Heat
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in brief quotations within reviews and otherwise permitted by copyright law.

This is a work of fiction.
Any aspect of this work — names, characters, places, and/or incidents — are products of the author’s imagination and/or used fictitiously.
Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons (living or dead) is purely coincidental.

Cover Design by Books and Moods
Interior Formatting by Gee at DarkbyDesign
Editing by Lauren Alsten

Dedication

For those wild and crazy dreams I’ll never stop chasing.

1. Savannah

I had a vision.
Not the kind you see in movies–the ones where psychics see the future and the year of your death and that kind of bullshit.

No. I had a real vision. A goal, if you will. My own thrift shop, filled to the brim with collectables you’d never be able to find anywhere else. Every nook and cranny would be stuffed with trinkets, and people from miles around would come to see me, Savannah Miles, a self-made legend. Maybe I’d even have my own TV show. Life hadn’t always been easy for me, with the darkness pulling me down every opportunity it got, but I had found an outlet in treasure hunting. We didn’t have a lot of money growing up, so my keepsakes became anything I could find at thrift stores and flea markets.

Some people called it hoarding. I called it love.

Finding the perfect thrift was a high nothing else topped. Not even sex could surmount the thrill of rummaging around the loaded shelves of a random shop. I didn’t like to consider the fact that maybe I hadn’t had good sex.

But back to my vision, otherwise known as the reason I found myself in this shit town a few miles from my childhood home. The dream of opening my own shop had seemed unreachable, until a Great Uncle Alfred I’d never heard of died and left me a small sum of cash. I didn’t know the guy, but I was never one to look a gift horse in the mouth, either. The inheritance wasn’t a lot, but enough to either pay off my oppressive student loans or put a down payment on a place I could call my own. Getting approved for a mortgage might be difficult, but I wouldn’t have to worry about loans if I bought a cheap enough place.

You already know what I did. The student loans would always be there, but if I didn’t jump on this opportunity, it might have disappeared before I had the chance to turn my dream into reality.