Total pages in book: 99
Estimated words: 89228 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 446(@200wpm)___ 357(@250wpm)___ 297(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 89228 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 446(@200wpm)___ 357(@250wpm)___ 297(@300wpm)
The dolls in the cabinet were the only two in the garage with hair, the strands intricately woven together in various shades of brown. Why weren't they damaged like the others? Why were they the only ones safely displayed behind glass? What did they mean to him?
They held answers. Shivering curiosity drew her hand to the knob on the glass door.
“Don't touch those.”
His harsh voice made her jump, and she yanked her hand back. Shit. She shook off her nerves and turned to face him. “You collect dolls.” Hollow-eyed, creepy-ass plastic people.
Perching on a wheeled stool, he rolled toward the table and placed his palms on the surface, staring blankly at the clutter around his hands. “I make them, collect them, and...break them.”
An emotionless response, but layers hummed beneath the words. He leaned back, knees spread, hands folded between his strong thighs. He watched her from beneath dark eyebrows, his full lips relaxed and pouty. He was somewhat childlike, surrounded by dolls, sulking and rolling on the stool. Yet he commanded the room with the intensity of his sullen temperament, all that muscle, and...the stretch of his jeans cupping his cock so erotically.
She jerked her gaze up. The man was fucking sexy as hell, doll fetish notwithstanding. She swallowed and continued her exploration around the perimeter, attempting to make sense of it. As she wandered, she peeked back every now and then, finding him tracking her every movement with hooded eyes.
A weight bench sat at one end, surrounded by a mess of mismatched dumbbells. She hoped to learn a lot more about him than the location of his damned workouts. When she reached the farthest corner, she faced him again. “Why do you break them? You don't sell them?”
His huge hands cradled a small headless body, his thumb moving over a two-inch hole punched through the torso. “I'm more interested in quality control.” He tossed it behind him.
She flinched as the doll skidded across the cement floor. He broke dolls for fun. Her heart crashed into a roaring panic. Had he harmed a real child at some point? Was this his way of dealing with that? Or maybe he had been the child?
Her spine crawled with millions of icy pinpricks. Her feet stuck to the floor, the span of the garage separating her from the darkness surrounding the man she might've gravely misjudged. “Why do the dolls need quality control?” Fear quivered in her voice despite her best attempts to stifle it.
He rose from the stool and walked toward a box of undamaged bodies with a terrifying calmness. Paralyzed, she watched as he yanked out the plastic mold of a baby—its limbs attached—and dropped it on the floor. Then his bare foot came down, smashing the body with one stomp.
She stopped breathing. Was this some kind of reenactment? Horrified, she wanted to look away, but she couldn't. She had to know.
The torso cracked beneath his foot, and the head popped off. Dizziness swarmed her head, sending her ears ringing in a frenzied pulse.
With hands on his hips and his head tipped down, hard eyes rolled up and locked on her. “That's why.”
She wrapped her arms around her waist, her fingers sticky and trembling. Quality control meant he was looking for flaws, right? Was he looking for a doll that could survive a heavy foot? That didn't make any sense. Oh God, she didn't want it to make sense.
Breathing deeply from her diaphragm, she smothered her dread with a strong voice. “I don't understand. Why are you smashing them like that?”
He looked away, his lips in a flat line, seemingly refusing to answer. But he wanted to. She could see it in the rise and fall of his chest and in the shift of his eyes as they studied the collection, searching for the words.
Endless seconds passed, the stillness strangling, before his Adam's apple bobbed and his fingers twitched on his hips. “It was the first and last toy I owned. A goddamned doll.” He laughed nervously, his hand lifting to rub the back of his neck. “I don't even know how I got it. Probably from one of those missionaries who would pop in to deliver food and Jesus pamphlets.”
A clot of emotion gathered in her throat. Something had happened to him. She lowered her hands to her shorts, gripping them. “This was when you lived in the colonia?”
He nodded and crouched over the broken doll, glaring at it. “I was a nine-year-old boy. What the fuck was I doing with a doll?”
His tone was angry, at odds with the tender way his finger traced the jagged hole in the doll's torso at his feet. He seemed to be lost in memory, his silence hardening the lump she couldn't swallow. She stepped forward, aching to erase the distance, but the jerk of his shoulders halted her approach.