Total pages in book: 112
Estimated words: 108124 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 541(@200wpm)___ 432(@250wpm)___ 360(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 108124 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 541(@200wpm)___ 432(@250wpm)___ 360(@300wpm)
“How am I supposed to do this?” Harper said. “I miss you already, and you’ve only been gone six days. You know I don’t like people enough to make a new friend.”
I smiled. “You have plenty of friends.”
“Not real ones like you.”
I sighed. Harper wasn’t wrong. She’d been the one thing that had kept me up north the last year or two. Lord knows, in the six years we’ve been separated, Alex’s dad didn’t give us a reason to stay. He barely ever saw his son even though we’d lived in the same city.
“I miss you, too. But you’re going to come down and visit soon, right?”
“Of course. I can’t wait.”
“Alright, well… That’s how we’ll get through this—looking forward to vacations and visits. But listen, I gotta run. Alex is down the block at his new friend’s house. I just finished cleaning out the attic in the B&B, and I really need to jump in the shower. It was so hot and dirty. I think I might smell. The heat down here is enough to roast a lizard.”
“They roast lizards down there?”
I chuckled. “Not that I’ve ever seen. But my mom said that the other day, and Alex looked at her like she had two heads. The lingo is going to take some getting used to for him.”
She laughed. “I’ll talk to you in a few days, my little buttah biscuit.”
“Bye, Harp.”
After I hung up, I peeled my yoga pants down my clammy legs, unstuck the thong glued to my ass, and stood in front of the unimpressive air conditioner in my bedroom. The thing was producing the equivalent of me filling my cheeks with hot air and blowing out. I needed to add find an AC repairman to my mile-long to-do list if there was any hope I was going to make it through the summer heat.
A Bose SoundLink speaker sat on the nearby nightstand. I’d turned down the music when my cell phone rang, and the low sound of Justin Timberlake’s “SexyBack” wafted below the loud clanking of the dysfunctional AC. I walked over and cranked it up, pulled the tie from my ponytail, and returned to let the air blow my blond hair back, Beyoncé-video style. Shutting my eyes, I began to move to the rhythm of the song.
It felt like forever since I’d danced. I used to love it. In high school, I’d been the head of the dance squad, and Harper and I liked to go out dancing on occasion. But really dancing? Dancing like no one was watching? It had been years. So I went with the urge. Why not? I was the only person in the B&B, and the blinds were shut.
I started slow, swaying back and forth, until my hips decided to join in on the fun. By the time the chorus came around the second time, I was full-on shaking my goods all over. Tanner had been an ass man. Years ago, after the Miley Cyrus VMA twerk had gone viral, I’d caught him watching it on his laptop. So I’d surprised him and learned to twerk. Now, at the ripe old age of twenty-nine, I wasn’t sure I could move like that anymore. But when Justin asked to see what I was twerking with, I obliged. And I’ll be damned if I didn’t still have it. So I went to town—twerking my jiggly, naked ass like nobody’s business while the air conditioning continued to blow my hair back.
When the song ended, an odd, euphoric feeling came over me, and I couldn’t stop smiling. Maybe being back in Beaufort, South Carolina, would be good for me after all.
And maybe naked dancing was just what I needed.
Or maybe not.
I turned around to head to the shower, and my heart leapt into my throat as I found a man leaning casually against the bedroom doorframe.
I jumped and let out a blood-curdling scream. My self-defense mechanism kicked in, and I picked up the nearest thing I could get my hands on and hurled it across the room. Fortunately, I’d grabbed the Bose SoundLink, and that thing packed a wallop. The hard plastic connected with the intruder’s head, and he went down for the count.
Shaking, I looked around for another weapon, but the room was pretty sparse. So I grabbed my cell phone from the bed and called 9-1-1, hoping they’d arrive before he came to.
The operator asked my name and address and then said the police had been dispatched. “Is the intruder breathing, Presley?”
My eyes widened. Could I have killed him? Oh my God. I thought I might throw up. “I don’t know. But he’s not moving.”
“Okay. Just stay on the phone with me. The police are en route. Can you make your way outside safely?”
I shook my head, though the woman obviously couldn’t see me. “He’s lying in the doorway, and there’s no other way out. There’s an air conditioner in the window.”