Total pages in book: 138
Estimated words: 138981 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 695(@200wpm)___ 556(@250wpm)___ 463(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 138981 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 695(@200wpm)___ 556(@250wpm)___ 463(@300wpm)
My fresh start turned into a dumpster fire.
Awesome new job. Small town heaven. Friendly faces galore.
Then I strolled into my new home and found the unspeakable.
Just when I'm sure it can't get worse, I'm “rescued” by a man who makes me see red for miles.
Enter Lucas Graves.
A bossy grump with a badge who's sworn to keep me safe.
He rocks the scary-hot vibe, he reads too much, and he never misses a chance to give me crap for being a nerdy little cactus who mouths back.
Not the type of man I'd go for in my right mind.
Definitely not the type I should keep trading bruising kisses with.
Redhaven, North Carolina has driven me insane.
Why else does my heart race when Lucas gets jealous and overprotective?
How could I think he'll ever share more than another reckless night?
He guards his own battered heart as fiercely as he watches over me.
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
1
Lady In Red (Delilah)
No one ever totally captures the stillness of a desolate highway leading far, far away from the only city you know.
Oh, they might try.
They’ll tell you about the streaming cars slowing to a trickle, and then to crawling ants scattered few and far between.
They’ll tell you about the wide-open sky, the way the yellow dotted line on the road runs together into a single liquid stream.
They’ll tell you about the forests, the grass, the countless fences drifting by.
And they’ll always mention the silence. Nothing but your tires grinding on tarry asphalt and the occasional bump when you veer too close to the shoulder.
What they won’t tell you, though?
What it feels like to be alone for the first time in your life.
What the stillness is when you can’t hear anyone else.
No slamming doors.
No whistles from the street below.
No phones blaring down the narrow halls of an apartment building full of disjointed lives crammed together, each one insulated in its own little bubble of humming refrigerators and televisions and notifications.
There’s just nothing.
Nothing but quiet stretching on for so long, so deep, that you start to hear your own pulse.
It’s unlike anything I’ve ever known.
Somehow, it feels like a shower, rinsing off the dirt of big-city life and making me ready to step into a whole new chapter of me.
I’m not sure if that’s what’s waiting in North Carolina.
I couldn’t even tell you what really made me take a job in a tiny town I’ve never heard of, close enough to Raleigh to get decent internet but too far to make a day drive to the beach worth the commute.
When I responded to the postage-stamp-sized ad in my neighborhood circular for a K-4 teacher, I wasn’t actually expecting to get the job.
I have the degrees, but not much experience beyond a few supervised part-time and substitute teaching gigs in inner-city schools.
Something like this—a full-time position with room and board covered—would be a pipe dream back in New York.
Sure, I worked my ass off.
Perfect grades. Awards. Extracurriculars. Internships.
So maybe I was the most qualified candidate willing to move to a town that’s barely a dot on the map and probably doesn’t have a single Uber.
But maybe, just maybe, no one else could stand the thought of living in this much stillness.
Me? I could ride like this forever.
Just me and my ratty old Kia Sportage with everything I own piled in the back, cruising into an endless red sunset.
It’s barely late afternoon, the light brassy and thick, by the time Google Maps chirps and tells me to take the next exit.
There’s not a single building around. No gas stations, no rest stops, just low, sloping hills and walls of pines and poplars turning the off-ramp highways into corridors.
Not a single car in front of me or behind me for miles.
I might as well be the last woman on Earth.
My GPS leads me on through a spiderweb of old backwoods highways and spangled shadows.
As I crest the top of a hill, the robotic voice on my phone announces, “Now arriving in Redhaven, North Carolina.”
Then I look down at the view below.
Wow.
I actually feel like I’ve arrived.
Redhaven is a triple dose of that peaceful stillness I’ve felt ever since I crossed the New York state line.
The green slopes cup the town in their palm, nestled like this little secret in the forest.
Colonial architecture, rustic buildings centered around a paved town square pinned in place by a bronze statue of a man on a horse with his sword held high.
Streets ribboning out from the town center, narrowing as they curl into residential areas with the kind of cozy, deceptively simple homes people will pay a fortune to retire in.
On the far edge of town, there’s even a glimmering green lake with little piers on one side and thick shadowed woods on the other.
It’s warm and welcoming.
Everything except the one bright place that shines like a cathedral, dominating the forest around it with golden reflections spinning off its coppery roof.
It’s less a house on a hill and more like some fairy-tale castle, all towering baroque architecture and weathered stone spires. Completely out of place in this sweet little place of wooden shutters and shingled roofs and open porches.
I tense up just looking at it.
A strange undercurrent warms the muggy late August heat until the air turns stifling.
The house crouches there like this grand gargoyle, standing watch over the town, reflecting the daylight from massive windows.
It almost feels like it’s accusing me.
Why are you here? What are you running from?
I swallow thickly.
I don’t know.
Maybe nothing.
Maybe just from me.
…or maybe from the creepy ex-boyfriend who thought I couldn’t see him parked outside my apartment building, watching my every move for weeks on end.
Yeah.
That, I’m thrilled to get away from.
I have the worst taste in men.
But I tear myself away from the austere house and press on, carefully working the brakes on the slope downward.