Total pages in book: 44
Estimated words: 40546 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 203(@200wpm)___ 162(@250wpm)___ 135(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 40546 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 203(@200wpm)___ 162(@250wpm)___ 135(@300wpm)
I’m in town for a wedding. Heels, champagne, and a final thesis on wilderness survival.
He’s the Boone brother who gets paid to keep people like me from dying out here. The one who swore off women a decade ago.
I’m too soft. Too mouthy. I don’t listen.
Now I’m tripping over roots and testing his patience.
And learning things they definitely don’t teach in grad school.
I came for extra credit.
He came to show me it’s okay to let go.
When I leave the mountain to finish my degree, he does the one thing I never saw coming.
He puts on a suit.
Because Daddy won’t ever let me walk away.
Author's Book 2 in the Real Daddies Boone Brothers Series. These can be read as standalones but they are loosely interconnected. So, come for the bark, stay for the bite and watch this little academic overachiever find out just how much fun getting dirty can be. Safe, no cheating, and totally obsessed with his girl from the first swing
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
One
Marley
Two glasses of champagne is my limit.
Should have been, at least.
But three gave me enough courage to sit at the head table with a sea of eyes on me.
Four is why I'm currently clutching a bouquet of white roses while the wedding reception spins around me like a glittering kaleidoscope.
"You okay, honey?" My best friend Sarah's aunt touches my elbow, her voice cutting through the blur of laughter and clinking glasses as I rub the painful spot on my forehead where the base of the bouquet made its landing. "You look a little unsteady."
I force a smile and hold up the bouquet that nearly concussed me. "Just surprised I caught this thing. Sarah's got quite an arm."
The older woman chuckles and moves on, everyone watching having a good laugh at the meme-worthy sight of me receiving the bouquet between the eyes only to have it fall like a baby into my outstretched hands.
The champagne, lack of nutrition because I can’t stand eating in front of anyone let alone a room full of strangers, combined with a floral blow to the head have left me swaying beside the towering wedding cake with its ombre icing and personalized cake topper with the bride and groom imagined as their D & D characters.
This entire wedding and reception here at Wildfire Mountain Lodge has been a full-on Pinterest board.
Fairy lights hang from everything that will stand still, flowers that look rustic yet elegant are on every surface, guests dancing to a live bluegrass band, and enough champagne flowing to float a tugboat. I've driven six hours from Ann Arbor talking myself out of a panic attack the entire way, , my little Honda packed with bridesmaid duties and thesis stress.
When Sarah sprung the whole wedding plan on me three months ago, my throat closed up as she laid out all the duties and time involved in being a bridesmaid. As well as all the interacting with people I didn’t know I would need to do.
Then, a month ago when my advisor told me I needed a last immersive experience to complete my final thesis paper, I saw the silver lining in this trip to the Wildfire Lodge in Upper Michigan.
After doing a full investigation of the area, turns out wilderness survival outings around here are a thing. So tomorrow morning, instead of suffering through the bridesmaid’s breakfast, I’m heading over to Boone's Outdoor Gear, where I’ll be getting my first taste of what it would be like to live after the apocalypse.
It all worked out, so I should be happy. I am happy. Insofar as I feel happiness. Being a spectrum girl, I’m aware my emotional receptors are not calibrated like the majority of humans. Being touched makes me grit my teeth. Hugs are not calming or comforting. More like straining to open a pickle jar. Friends have never been a priority for me. Being at the top of my class since my parents had me reading and writing at the age of three has been the pinpoint focus of my life.
Still, Sarah, who answered my parents’ ad for a roommate for me freshman year, turned out to be the sister and friend I never saw coming. Being sixteen when I started at U of M, I couldn’t stay in the dorm. So, Mom and Dad advertised for someone to sort of babysit me in exchange for a zero-rent opportunity at the loft apartment they rented just off campus. Sarah answered the ad, and turned out she had a neurodivergent younger brother, so instead of seeing me as a socially inept and annoying adolescent prodigy, she took me under her wing as a pseudo-sister.
I’d do anything for her. Including wear this ridiculous pink nightmare of lace and ruffles that makes my butt itch and has large dark circles growing on the chiffon under my arms.
Being the youngest person at most of my peer group’s social gatherings is nothing new. I've been catching up socially my entire life. But watching Sarah's other friends dance and laugh, all of them seeming so naturally confident in ways I've never quite mastered, makes the champagne feel like a necessary social lubricant rather than a celebration.
As the band does a blues version of the Chicken Dance, my focus is on being alone in the Michigan wilderness with some gruff outdoorsman who probably thinks journalism majors are as useful as chocolate tampons. Something to push my limits my advisor said. A chance to write about survival from the inside out. Feels like more of a nightmare to a girl that only goes outside to get from one class to another and thinks grass is itchy and roughing it is sleeping on less than 100% Egyptian cotton sheets, but here I am, committed to the madness because it’s the last check mark I need on my degree, and there’s no way I’m not acing this thesis.