Total pages in book: 98
Estimated words: 92559 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 463(@200wpm)___ 370(@250wpm)___ 309(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 92559 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 463(@200wpm)___ 370(@250wpm)___ 309(@300wpm)
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Out in the front acreage of Camp Ghreylke, as a vehicle went by them on the lane, Mahrci’s instinct was to run. But maybe it was just the groundskeeper coming back? The truck had been gone, the plow left behind. It wasn’t necessarily her father. Or, as the humans called them, her fiancé.
Ex-fiancé.
“Who are you afraid of,” Hemmy said into the darkness. “And how can I help you.”
Not a question. A statement of intent.
“Let it go.” She shifted her eyes to him. “Let me . . . go. I’m nothing to you.”
“Who decides that—”
“You don’t even know me.”
The male shook his head slowly. “And you’re out here, humping fifty-pound bags of grain in the snow for animals you don’t know.”
Exhaling a curse, she breathed, “You don’t know what he’s capable of.”
“I’m not worried.”
“You should be,” she whispered. “You just don’t understand.”
“Try me.”
Mahrci looked away. Looked back. “I’m sorry . . . I can’t talk about it. And that is the truth. It’s also all I can give anybody right now.”
There was a long silence. Then he nodded. “Okay. Fair enough. So are you dematerializing out of here right now? Or are we going back together.”
“You could leave now—”
“No, I don’t run. From anything.” His eyes searched her face. “You can go to my place in Caldwell, you know. Take some time to figure out whatever this is. No one needs to know you’re there, and I’ll leave you alone, too. If that’s what you want.”
“Why are you doing this.”
He reached out and took the grain bag from her. Then just held it up.
Taking a deep breath, she closed her eyes. “I’m going back to the big house to pack.”
She wanted to beg Hemmy to race off to wherever he lived in Caldwell and forget all about her. She wanted to protect him—even though, as she measured the heft of his shoulders, like he needed defense from the likes of her?
“And I’m going back with you.”
As his words were carried away on the wind, it was hard to calm herself, and when she wasn’t readily able to dematerialize, she wondered if she was going to have to walk back. Except then she was flying through the cold air in a scatter of molecules, returning to the vacation house her father never went to. But was now outfitting with security cameras?
What the hell was he up to?
When she re-formed, it was at the front entrance, at the base of the steps—
It wasn’t her father. Or Remis.
Or the groundskeeper.
“Jesus! Sneak up on a man!”
Over at the side porch, the human farmer jumped back from his truck bed and grabbed the front of his chest like he was having a heart attack. Mr. Yates was in his sixties, and wearing the same blue-and-black-check wool jacket, knee-high barn boots, and black cap he always did. With his white beard and white hair that curled around the edges of that little hat, he was like Santa’s thinner brother—except for the fact that he was cranky as a mule.
And crap, in her distraction, she’d almost sprung an out-of-thin-air on him. Thank heavens she’d picked the front and not over there.
“Sorry,” she called out roughly.
Glancing around and not seeing Hemmy anywhere, she headed across the snow in her snowshoes.
“Thanks for bringing all that grain,” she said as she came up to the man and his truck.
She got a grunt in reply as he hauled another bag off the bed and onto the pile he was building under the porch’s cover.
Glancing around for Hemmy, she knew better than to ask Mr. Yates if she could help. Back in the fall, she’d come up for what was supposed to have been a romantic weekend with Remis—and she’d first met the farmer then, promptly offending him by stepping in to grab a bag. His expression had been a combination of you-said-what-about-my-mother and clearly-you-are-from-downstate. She’d have gotten a better reception if she’d stomped on his bare foot.
Still, she’d come to like him.
“Lane’s cleared good,” he said as he threw another sack onto the stack. “That man knows what he’s doing with a plow.”
Wow. She was going to have to tell Callum that he’d won the upstate New York equivalent of a Nobel Peace Prize.
“He’s very handy,” she said as she looked over her shoulder again. “We’re lucky to—”
Up on the roof of the maintenance garage, by the chimney, a figure materialized—and even with the distance, she could tell Hemmy was glowering.
She motioned across the distance that This Wasn’t A Problem.
Fortunately, Mr. Yates wasn’t paying attention to anything overhead—and when Hemmy nodded and squatted into a sit on the roof ridge, it looked like, of all the crap she had to worry about tonight, explaining that vampires did in fact exist to an old-school farmer was not on her list of things to grit her teeth and get through.