Total pages in book: 218
Estimated words: 209489 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1047(@200wpm)___ 838(@250wpm)___ 698(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 209489 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1047(@200wpm)___ 838(@250wpm)___ 698(@300wpm)
I could be reasonable.
He already knew too much.
It didn’t make sense to be stubborn in this situation.
So…
One step at a time. For now. Even if it was scary.
But that was fucking life, wasn’t it?
CHAPTER
FIFTEEN
“Fuck,” Alexander cursed as his steps slowed, and he lifted his chin up toward the sky.
I’d been watching it for the last… however long we’d been going. It had been hours since we’d last stopped. The sun had stayed sleepy and hidden the whole day, the clouds being a bunch of dramatic pains in the asses that had only gotten darker and darker. Thunder had been crackling for hours nonstop, like it was following us.
He was probably thinking the same thing I was—the rain was coming, and it was coming soon.
Again.
Fortunately and unfortunately, we hadn’t found anything other than some game trails. We were nowhere near shit. I hadn’t seen a house or even some kind of hunting cabin, and I doubted he had either with how focused he’d been on keeping his run steady.
I’d swallowed more vomit and thick saliva than I’d want to admit.
“We need to take shelter,” he said, coming to a complete stop. His hands went to his hips and grazed my thighs for a second before he dropped them. An eye peeked at me from over his shoulder. “It smells like it might hail.”
The Defender raised his gaze again at the same time thunder and lightning shook the trees and lit up the sky directly over our heads.
I jumped, or more like I squeezed the shit out of him. One of us could handle getting struck by lightning, and that person wasn’t me. I wasn’t the only one who had the same thought when he glanced over his shoulder again.
I smiled at him. Weak. Tired but relieved enough that it almost made up for it.
He focused forward again and started to move, glancing up over and over again. Then his head swung from side to side, from tree to tree, like he was trying to find something. Not too long later, three more way-too-close rolls of thunder and streaks of lightning above our heads, he suddenly stopped under a big tree with wide, spanning branches. One hand brushed my calf, and I took that as my sign to jump down—or slide down more like it, wincing in fucking soreness as my legs wobbled.
Honestly, I had a newfound respect for cowboys. Alex was no damn horse, but I still had no idea how the hell those men and women could ride all day. They were my new heroes.
I swallowed hard, trying my best to ignore my headache and everything else wrong with me—which was fucking everything—as he gestured me to follow. Eventually we stopped at a decent-sized creek as the trees swayed and the faint tinkling of raindrops hitting the branches and the leaves warned us it had started again. I almost fell on my face as I kneeled. I wanted to massage my ass, but I didn’t want him to know it was bothering me. His shoulders might ache from holding me.
We both drank quietly, and I was beyond worrying about dysentery or whatever other fucked-up illness I could get from contaminated water. Pulling the bottle of pills he’d given me earlier out of my pocket, I shook two out, then swallowed them with a handful of water.
As I wiped at my mouth with my shoulder, a shiver raced from my shoulders down to my thighs.
A big hand gripped my elbow, and I looked up as Alexander helped me stand. “Come on before it starts pouring.”
He let go, but side by side we so, so slowly walked back in the direction we’d come, a few drops making it through the canopy and onto us.
“Under here,” he said, ducking beneath the same tree I was pretty sure we’d stopped at. It was a huge one.
At the base, he kneeled and rolled onto his butt, pushing back against the trunk before stretching his legs straight out in front of him.
Don’t mind if I do. This might as well be the Ritz. Taking the backpack off, I crawled after him under there, doing the same, but beside him, so close his arm pressed against mine. The ground was hard, but not as bad thanks to the bed of pine needles. I sighed just as more thunder and lightning struck even closer, heavy rain making the branches ring right before drops hit the ground around us. A few landed on my arms and legs, but he must have chosen a good tree because what fell on us was only a fraction of what was falling around.
“How are you feeling?” he asked out of the blue after a long while, his voice steady like the countless hours of running with a full-sized human hadn’t worn him down.
Here I was exhausted, and I hadn’t done shit. “I’m feeling much better,” I croaked, not just full of shit but bursting with it.