Total pages in book: 16
Estimated words: 14860 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 74(@200wpm)___ 59(@250wpm)___ 50(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 14860 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 74(@200wpm)___ 59(@250wpm)___ 50(@300wpm)
I was a ball of need by the time his fingertips pushed the shirt off my shoulders. I automatically tensed up as the burn scars were revealed. He couldn’t even see the worst of them yet; just the few that wrapped around my arms a bit as well as the tops of my shoulders. When his lips closed over the raised flesh, I could feel a tear slip unbidden from my eye. But it wasn’t until he ran his hands along my scarred back and whispered, “Do they still hurt, my love?” that I lost it altogether.
I didn’t answer him because I was too busy wrapping myself around him in the hopes that he’d never let me go.
I must have whispered the last words aloud because I received a response I hadn’t been expecting.
“Never, baby. Never letting you go.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
HUDSON
The only thing better then falling asleep with Andrew in my arms was waking up with him there, though that didn’t happen often enough because he’d usually already snuck out of the house long before I’d woken up.
It had been three weeks since our first date which had started off as the night from hell and ended up with me knowing that the man I’d started to fall in love with online had become a man I was already so far gone for that there would be no coming back from it.
We hadn’t even made love yet. It was this strange, silent agreement that we’d both seemed to just get. Andrew had admitted to his virginity early on—something I found sexy as fuck but that he was adorably embarrassed about—and had told me that he wasn’t ready to expose our relationship to anyone except his sister, whom I’d met the day after our first date. Admittedly, it had been difficult to focus fully on the young girl because I’d been completely appalled at the pair’s living conditions. I’d just assumed they’d rented a place somewhere near the ranch but when Andrew had admitted that they were living on my property, I couldn’t have imagined any single building they could possibly be occupying since all of the livable bunks and cabins for the staff were on the same acreage as the main house.
Well, it had turned out they weren’t living in a building at all. They’d been living in a little trailer in a field near a water spigot that was used for the cattle in the fall season. They had no running water, no working toilet, and no fucking electricity. They were solely reliant on the cattle’s water supply for everything from cooking over a little stove run by a small propane tank to washing their clothes and bathing with it.
I’d been apoplectic by the time I’d said my goodbyes to Jennie and practically dragged Andrew out of the trailer to find out what the hell was going on. He’d been terribly embarrassed about the conditions but had insisted he was taking good care of his sister. It was only when I’d calmed down that I’d gotten the full story.
After getting out of the hospital when his burn treatments had ended, Andrew had been placed in foster care, but not with the same family as his sister. When they’d finally been allowed to see each other and Andrew had seen the bruises on his sister’s arms, he’d simply taken her by the hand, led her out the side door of the house and they’d been on the run ever since.
The knowledge that they’d been enduring such hellish conditions and the fear of being caught every day of their lives had made me want to fix things then and there, but Andrew had refused and we’d had a massive argument right there in front of his trailer. Thankfully, as soon as night had fallen, I’d found him in the barn, and we’d made up both with words and with our bodies. After getting each other off and lying beneath a light blanket in the tiny room we kept in the barn for nights when a horse required someone to be available twenty-four hours, we’d had a reasonable conversation and had settled on him and his sister moving to one of the cabins that, while livable, wasn’t exactly comfortable and was set farther off the property than the rest of the buildings.
In public, I still had to call Andrew by his detested nickname, but at night when he snuck into my house through the unlocked back door just so we could hold each other for a while, it became him and me and the rest of the world fell away. The problem with treating Andrew like any other employee was that I had to let the other ranch hands keep treating him like shit. I’d sworn to Andrew that it would be his decision when we took our relationship public.