Total pages in book: 24
Estimated words: 22096 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 110(@200wpm)___ 88(@250wpm)___ 74(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 22096 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 110(@200wpm)___ 88(@250wpm)___ 74(@300wpm)
I don’t answer that. I don’t want her thinking I’m violent without a cause, an angry jack ass looking to knock heads together for the thrill of it. I’ve only ever fought when I had to. Course, I had to a lot.
We drift into silence for several long moments and finally, I pull the truck along the dirt road and park it in front of my barn. Ranch isn’t much but it’s home. Makes me more than enough to afford my brother’s care and keep me in beer. Put the rest of it back in them special little accounts that make my money earn more money. Don’t understand how it all works but I know enough zeroes when I count them.
Now I’m wondering what she’ll think of my place. Will she like it? Will it be inviting to her, the kind of ranch where she can imagine raising our youngins together? Fuck, now I’m thinking about her belly round with my baby, and I want that more than I’ve ever wanted anything else in my life. I want to breed her ripe body until it’s nice and full of my come.
I help her out of my truck, taking her hand as we walk the path up to the house. All gravel and rocks and shit with no lights. Gonna have to fix that. Light up the path and the front yard, give her some light to see her way around so she can come out on the porch and holler to the boys that it’s time for dinner. Maybe I’ll teach them how to build a tree fort in the front yard, show them how to fish, and raise them up to be decent cowboys.
As we approach the house, I can’t help but be grateful that she’s seeing it for the first time at night. The dark camouflages the broken siding, the cracked windowpanes, and the loneliness that seems to haunt the place. It’s a broken home for a broken cowboy.
“Watch your step,” I warn her, showing her how to avoid the porch board that’s about to crack clean down the middle. Meant to get around to fixing that. I’ll have to bump it up on my to do list, so she and the boys are happy here.
The inside isn’t much better. It’s still decorated in the seventies style with the shag carpeting, wood paneling, and plaid couch that’s sagging in the middle. The place itself is exactly the way my mama left it, like it’s still waiting for her to come home.
Things only get worse from here. The whole house smells like mildew. Water pipes keep busting on me. I been replacing them as it happens but now the house just smells like I’m a grown ass man that don’t know how to clean. I’ll be lucky if she doesn’t run from here screaming.
She pauses in the entryway and I brace myself. Her fingers lightly caress the oak cabinet I made years ago. It was one of my first pieces. When I look at it, I can see all the things I wish I’d done different. “This is beautiful workmanship.”
Her praise fills me up, a cold drink of water after being in the desert for years. I gesture around the house as she follows me. “I’m renovating the place.”
Yeah, that sounds good. Better than telling her I just realized what a shithole it is now that I have the love of my life standing in here. She won’t ever want to live here unless I get it fixed up. Even if she did, I wouldn’t let her. She deserves a palace, a place fit for a queen. My queen.
I toss my Stetson and phone on the couch in the living room then guide her toward the kitchen with its peeling green linoleum and yellow cabinets. The bubbled wallpaper once featured a series of dancing rabbits. Now they’re mainly faded. Guess that’s something to be grateful for.
“What do you want to eat?” I bark to distract her from inspecting the place.
She still glances around the kitchen, taking it all in. Then her gaze settles on me and she tilts her head, like I’m a puzzle she’s trying to figure out. “Why are they all scared of you?”
I cross the kitchen in two strides to stand in front of her. I’m so close our breaths are mingling, and I can feel the heat coming from her body. The air around us is sticky and charged, like right before a Carolina thunderstorm. “Better question is why you’re not scared of me.”
5
MAISY
I can count the flecks of gold in Striker’s gaze. Now that I’m standing near him, I see his eyes aren’t brown. Not truly. They’re hazel and mesmerizing. So mesmerizing up close.
He just asked me why I’m not scared of him and I tell him the truth, letting it slip from my lips as if he were my priest and I were sitting in confession. “Because they have you all wrong.”