Total pages in book: 74
Estimated words: 69910 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 350(@200wpm)___ 280(@250wpm)___ 233(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 69910 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 350(@200wpm)___ 280(@250wpm)___ 233(@300wpm)
I can do more. I have to do more. If he’s done something, I have to find a way to undo it. I have to find a way to save us all.
“No.”
The word shoots through me like a shard of ice. I’ve had nightmares about being impaled on icicles. Don’t ask me why. This is like one of them coming true. Bam, icicle right through the midsection. The fact that it’s summer doesn’t register in my analogy. I still feel like I’ve been run through with an icy shard of death.
It’s that word. And the way Dad says it. No. So ominous.
If he didn’t lose the company or the house, then what did he have to bet?
“You.” He can’t look at me. I feel like I didn’t hear him right. He’s the icicle. That word is the icicle. That word is doom. Still, I shoot a finger up and point at myself. It doesn’t matter that I’m still in disbelief.
“But…but…”
“I lost to him, and he won you. He’ll make a good husband, sweetheart. He’s a good man. He’ll take care of you.”
Holy fucking sweet thunderous tarnation. Husband? What the hell?
“What are you…” This can’t be real. This cannot be darned well fucking real. That word, husband, feels like a kick to the clit. There can’t be anything worse than that, really.
This is worse than the dreaded icicle. It’s worse than those scary movies I watched five years ago that still haunt me and make me want to sleep with the lights on whenever I get to thinking about them.
This is worse than the trashy dark romance novels I secretly love reading.
This is worse than the creepy dolls I love making and have stashed up in my room. I swear that some nights, they’re going to climb the ceiling and start spinning their heads around in different directions, but it hasn’t happened yet.
In real life, you can’t just win a person because you can’t bet a person in a poker game. “But John is…he…why would he want me?” Did I really just say that? Of all the silly, irrational things. I should be pointing out that I’m a person. That I have rights. That the agreement, or whatever, is void because you can’t just give another person away. You can’t force someone to do something like this. A person can’t be used to pay a debt. This isn’t the eighteen hundreds or any year after that. Women aren’t just given away. We’re not property. We’re not things to be traded or to increase one’s standing in society through an advantageous marriage.
“I didn’t lose to John.” Dad abruptly stands up from the table, looking like the hounds of hell are chasing after him, and…well, just…if he thinks he can do something as messed up as this, then maybe those hounds should be nipping and braying and bringing him back to reality and sense. “I lost to Apollo. As of three fourteen this morning, you’re engaged to Apollo Easton.”
CHAPTER 2
Patience
Holy baked beans on toast, that’s Apollo?
There’s no way. He’s gone from being a tall, lithe teenager with streamlined, stringy muscle and a creepy stash that he sometimes refused to shave off because he felt like having a few hairs on the upper lip was something of a conversation piece to a tall, filled out, built, jacked up, muscular man. There are no hairs sprouting here and there that he can laugh about. More like a perma-shadow all over a jaw that looks like it’s been carved out, just like much of the topography of the world was trenched out by icebergs in the past.
Icebergs. Not icicles. Although they both feel equally and terrifyingly awful at the moment.
Apollo didn’t show up when Dad was telling me the straight-up foul and nefarious story about how he got carried away—how he and John both did—and all of a sudden, the company was on the table. Either one of them—once best friends, now enemies—could finally take it all. Then, Apollo stepped in, Mister Ol’ High and Mighty God of Everything, and talked sense into his and my dad. They couldn’t just battle it out between the two of them and wager the company on a single hand. There had to be a third party involved—still a single hand. The winner takes all or names a prize equivalent to the company. Cooler heads obviously didn’t prevail, and the bet was on. The hands were dealt.
And now, I’m standing here, living history.
Apollo won. But he didn’t call the whole thing off. He didn’t say poker games were silly, and he was stepping in to get our dads to see reason. He didn’t laugh the whole thing off.
He didn’t name the company.
No, he named me.
My hand in marriage.
Dad kept insisting he didn’t have a choice. Either I marry Apollo as soon as it can be arranged—within a number of days probably—or he’ll have to give up his company because that was the deal. To Apollo, though, not to his dad, though it’s pretty much the same thing.