Total pages in book: 38
Estimated words: 35154 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 176(@200wpm)___ 141(@250wpm)___ 117(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 35154 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 176(@200wpm)___ 141(@250wpm)___ 117(@300wpm)
Yeah, I’d left reality behind. Because whatever this was, it was like the hottest dream I’d ever had come true.
…And I never wanted to wake up.
5
Dallas
I groaned as I sat back, resting on my elbow as I brought her flask up to my lips.
Holy shit, that’d been good. Like, really, really fucking good. Like, the best damn sex I’d ever even imagined.
…Who the fuck was this girl?
What’d just happened had unquestionably been the best sex of either me or my brother’s lives. Hands down. We’d shared a girl before on occasion, back in our old lives, but it’d never felt like that. It’d never felt so real and so natural — so easy, like we all just fit together like that.
And for the first time in, well, years, I felt human again.
…Shit, maybe we had been up here in the mountains for too long.
We hadn’t always been like that, of course. We hadn’t been born as the rough mountain men we were when she found us. Before, we’d come from wealth, and privilege. Back in Texas, before it all went to shit, we’d lived a very different life — one where living in an old ranger station tower up on a mountain and traipsing around in boots and denim and flannel shirts would never be a thing. Where lying naked out on a rock next to a mountain lake, sipping whiskey from a flask with the girl who’d just blown our minds and rocked our world would never happen.
In our other life — the one we’d left — we’d be in suits and ties, and attending business functions, or charity balls, or some other shit where rich people just congratulate each other on being rich. The life had really never appealed to either of us, but that still didn’t mean it didn’t sting like hell when everything came crashing down.
Our dad had been sick for a while — that was no secret. But him going as fast as he did came as a shock to both of us. But then, that wasn’t even the hardest blow. The rough part came after, when our piece of shit Uncle used his team of crooked lawyers and his leverage over our father’s crooked board members to steal his oil empire away from us, the named heirs in his will. Our mother had died when we were young, and without any other family save a brother he never trusted, our father left everything to us.
But then Uncle Richard had stepped in and fucked everything up. And stealing the company was only the start of it….
You see, dad had died quickly — quickly enough that even the doctors were blown away. So when one of them suggested foul play, suddenly, the whole thing fell apart. Instantly, our world was torn even more apart as detectives and cops and specialists ripped our grieving hearts open even more. Looking back, I could have seen the warning signs, but we were so overcome with the loss of dad that we never saw the surprise attack until it was too late.
…Uncle Richard had set us up hard.
It was one of our father’s board members, still loyal to our old man even in death, who’d tipped us off about it. Apparently, Richard had evidence that linked us to tampering with dad’s meds and pushing him into the heart attack that killed him. And with the cops en route to take us in, we acted fast.
We grabbed what little things we could, got in the car, and took off.
…And we hadn’t looked back in years.
We’d come here, to Blackthorn Mountain, because both of us remembered a time when our parents had taken us here when were young, before mom died. Our parents may have been wealthy beyond belief, but they believed in the strength of spirit and understanding that the world was bigger than money and the privilege we’d been afforded. They’d taken us out to the woods and hiking a bunch of times, but something about this mountain had left an impression on us.
And so this is where we’d been for the last few years — hiding out on Blackthorn, becoming one with it, and forgetting the life we knew. We’d done okay, and we weren’t upset with the life we’d found up there, just pissed about the way our old one had been taken from us, and even more pissed that our father’s death was going un-avenged.
But running into her that day? Well, shit, that’d been like the first breath of fresh air either of us had had in years.
I took another sip of her whiskey as I looked at her, sitting there naked between us like some fucking angel come down from heaven. Soft pale skin, those sexy freckles, that gorgeous red hair, and those big blue eyes so full of light and spark and goodness.