Total pages in book: 62
Estimated words: 78696 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 393(@200wpm)___ 315(@250wpm)___ 262(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 78696 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 393(@200wpm)___ 315(@250wpm)___ 262(@300wpm)
Hoping to skip the discussion of why I knew all about Old Man John’s land, I started to run at a ninety-degree angle from the fence post.
Our land was shaped as a large parallelogram, and I was starting in the very middle and working my way back away from the lake.
Remy was starting in the middle and moving down to the lake.
My father was leading his own search.
So, hopefully, between the three parties, we’d find Lucy.
The next four hours were spent searching for a little girl that seemed incredibly hard to find, and after looking both up and back down again, I was fairly positive she wasn’t on the property.
My dad’s acreage only amounted to about fifty-five acres, and we would’ve found her by now if she’d been on it.
Which left me wondering.
“Anything?” Remy and my father asked simultaneously once we met up again.
I shook my head. “She either walked past our house or is on Old Man John’s property.”
“Shit,” both my dad and Remy hissed.
“Yeah.”
“You’re gonna need to go talk to him,” Remy insisted.
I ground my teeth.
“Why me?” I asked a little shrilly.
“Because you’re the only one he likes,” my father countered.
“Mother fucker.”
“Don’t speak like that, it’s crass,” my mother said from the front porch.
I refrained from asking her why she wasn’t out here helping us as a comeback for her telling me how to talk.
Instead, I started stomping across the driveway and even further across the street to the old man’s driveway.
I was very aware of the huge man at my back, and almost happy that he was there.
Mr. Johns wasn’t my favorite person.
He was mean, and always kept my balls when they’d roll over to his property.
Luckily, the driveway wasn’t booby trapped.
But the moment I set foot onto his turf, the man came out on the porch and started to glare at me.
His eyes, though, widened when they saw Griffin at my back.
“What do you want?” Mr. Johns asked.
“There’s a little girl missing on our property, or yours,” I said without waiting for the niceties of saying hi or anything formal like that.
“And you think she’s on my property?” He asked carefully.
I nodded. “Yeah, I do. We’ve checked ours. Yours is the only other option.”
With the way the lake was situated around both of our properties, it really was just our property or his, unless the girl took to the road, and that was a whole different can of worms that we weren’t thinking about as of yet.
“Where you been, girl? Come inside,” Mr. Johns said as he made his way back into his house.
I tossed a look over at Griffin. “Don’t touch anything.”
He nodded and we both followed him in, walking up to a computer screen he had mounted on the wall next to his TV.
It looked like it could rival Fort Knox.
Griffin must’ve known exactly what it was, because he stiffened.
Me, though; yeah, I had no fuckin’ clue.
Instead, I just stood there like a dumbass while the two men studied the screen.
“Looks like the south quadrant…” Griffin said. “What do you have out there?”
Some military-sounding jargon was exchanged, and suddenly we were back down the road and across the street talking to the group of men.
“The little girl’s on this area right here,” Griffin said, handing them a piece of paper, a square area highlighted in the center, that I assumed was a map of Mr. Johns’ property.
When I went to follow them, one look from Griffin had me stopping in place.
“You won’t be coming,” he said menacingly.
I blinked.
“Okay,” I agreed.
There was no use arguing.
I could tell whatever my argument would be, he would easily counter it.
So I sat on the porch steps and waited for all of the menfolk to come back.
And they did twenty minutes later, with the little girl in tow.
My heart finally slowed. Standing, I ran forward.
“Where’d you find her?” I asked excitedly.
The little girl was ushered quickly to a waiting ambulance, and suddenly my body was hauled against Remy’s for a hard, unyielding embrace.
Then his mouth came down on my cheek before he let me go.
“You remember that time we were trying to get our baseball back?” Remy asked, letting me go only enough for him to sling his arm around my shoulders.
At my nod, he winced.
“Yeah, she was right there. Stuck in that stupid fuckin’ net that you got caught in,” Remy added.
I breathed out a sigh.
“Glad you found her,” I said, patting his belly and laying my head against his arm.
It never occurred to me that Griffin would be upset by the harmless show of affection between the two of us.
Remy and me…we were just that, Remy and me.
We’d known each other forever, and we were very close.
But, apparently, it was something that Griffin wouldn’t tolerate.
And when I saw him walking away with a murderous expression on his face, I pulled away from Remy and started running to him.
I caught up to him when he got to the woods, and leaned forward to grab his hand.
“Hey,” I said. “Stop.”
He ripped his hand away from my grip and turned around with a glare.
“Don’t touch me,” he growled.
I blinked. “What’s wrong?”
He raised a brow at me.
“What? Me?” I asked when I realized he was just staring at me like I was infected or something.
“I didn’t do anything.”
He leaned forward and ran a finger along the seam of my lips.
“If anyone can have it,” his eyes went to Remy in the distance. “Then I don’t want it.”
With that parting comment, he turned his back on me.
I hauled back and punched Griffin in the ass with my fist.
He whipped around and glared at me.
All six-foot-two-inches of pissed off Texas Ranger motorcycle man.
“Don’t hit me, little girl,” he growled.
I raised a brow at him and crossed my arms.
“Little girl? That’s not what you were calling me the other day,” I snapped.
He lifted a lip at me. “That was before I knew you’d forget me so quickly.”
I pulled back and let loose another punch, but he caught it with hilarious ease before it could make contact with his stomach, twisting my arm so I had no other recourse but to turn and face the tree that was at my back.