Total pages in book: 104
Estimated words: 98264 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 491(@200wpm)___ 393(@250wpm)___ 328(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 98264 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 491(@200wpm)___ 393(@250wpm)___ 328(@300wpm)
I ignored the urge to ask him where he’d gone and chewed on my bottom lip to stifle a laugh. “You have a dog?”
“Grandma does. It’s a mean little shit that bit me while I was sleeping once.”
“Maybe you were snoring?”
“Maybe it was bred from the devil himself.” He dove toward me, clinking his teeth like he was pretending to bite.
I jumped away laughing and not the kind of laugh I used when I needed to prove to Ramsey that I was okay or give adults a show so they didn’t ask too many questions.
This was real. And genuine. And so incredibly terrifying that I abruptly stopped and just stared at him.
“What?” he said, glancing over his shoulder. “What’s wrong?”
There was nothing wrong. In that second, at the creek, laughing with a kid who had shown up at the crack of dawn just to hang out with me, there was absolutely nothing wrong for the first time in quite possibly my entire life and it made the lump in my throat swell to the size of a watermelon.
The sweetest concern colored his face as he took a step toward me. “Nora, what’s going on? You okay?”
I backed away and desperately tried to compose myself, but my voice came out as a croak as I replied, “It’s just the shorts. They’re really ugly.”
He blew out a loud breath and then barked a laugh. “Jesus. You scared me. I thought you were having another heat stroke or something.”
Nope. Not a stroke, but something was happening inside my body and the jury was still out on whether it was a good something or a bad something.
He bent over and grabbed his bag. “Well, if you can forget about my shorts long enough to hang out, I snagged you some bug spray. I’m not sure if it works on beetles, but it should keep the rest of the ear monsters away.” He exaggerated a shiver and then shot me a smile.
Oh, God, he’d brought me bug spray.
The lump in my throat morphed into a ball of fire, stinging my eyes and my nose as I took the spray bottle from his hand. I’d never even thought to buy myself bug spray.
But Camden had.
“Thanks,” I whispered, not trusting my voice.
He rocked onto his toes and then back down to his heels. “No prob.”
I drew in a deep breath, holding it until my lungs ached, and tried to get myself together. This was ridiculous. It was just bug spray.
“You got the worms?” I asked.
“You know it. Hey, look what else I did.” Grabbing my forearm, he dragged me after him, talking a mile a minute as if he’d been saving each and every one of those syllables for me since seven a.m. “So, last night, I was thinking if we always turn in exactly a hundred worms, Mr. Leonard might get suspicious. So, each day, we need to take him a few less and sometimes a few extras. Mix it up. It will equal the same each week but not the same every day. But we gotta have somewhere to keep them on the days we give him less or we’ll be out the money.” He stopped beside an old oak tree and swung his arms out to the side. “Tada!”
Twisting my lips, I glanced around, trying to figure out what was so amazing about this particular tree. It wasn’t even one of the big ones, and if I was being honest, it was kind of crooked too. “It’s a tree. I don’t get it.”
“Oh, right.” He jumped into action. Bending over, he sank his fingers into the dirt and came up with the lid of a plastic container about the size of a shoe box. “Worm storage.” Full of excitement, he bounced his gaze from me to the container he’d buried in the ground. “Pretty cool, huh? I talked to my dad on the phone last night and he said worms can live for weeks as long as you keep them somewhere dark and cool. So I tossed in some dirt, poked holes in the lid, and boom—Stewart and Cole Worm Farm is in business.”
I openly gaped at him.
Holy smokes, this kid had thought of everything. I probably would have just tossed out a few worms every day. No, wait, I wouldn’t even have thought about turning in the same number every day and would have gotten myself fired by the end of the week.
I’d been wrong. Camden Cole wasn’t a genius.
He was the genius who taught the other geniuses.
He was next-level genius, and at the moment, he was my business partner. And it had not escaped me how he’d put my last name first in our company.
But most of all, I was starting to feel like he might be my friend.
Cue the lump in my throat again.