Total pages in book: 174
Estimated words: 172061 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 860(@200wpm)___ 688(@250wpm)___ 574(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 172061 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 860(@200wpm)___ 688(@250wpm)___ 574(@300wpm)
Look at you. Heartbreaker. How many hearts did you steal today?
But he wasn’t mine. He had never really been. He made that much clear when he left me behind.
That knowledge did nothing to stop the butterflies from lifting and scattering in my belly, the same way as they did when I was little more than a girl.
He held my shoulders rigid for a moment before he peeled his hands away, and he averted his gaze as he dipped down and snagged my towel.
Irritation lined his mouth as he opened it and held it out.
“Put this on.” Every word out of his mouth was a coarse scrape.
Jagged and grating.
Deep and low and sending vibrations rolling through the air.
“Thank you,” I mumbled, and I quickly wrapped myself in the thin cotton.
A tremble rolled through me, though it didn’t have anything to do with the chill from the water. It was all from the cold in Cash’s eyes.
He backed away, and he crossed his thick, tattooed arms over his chest.
My attention dropped there. Taking him in for a beat. This man who I hardly recognized but who once had known me better than anyone.
“How the fuck did you find me?” More knives and blades.
“I…I…” I stammered.
“What the hell are you doing here? Hiding out on my property?” he pressed. That question jerked my attention back up where it belonged.
To the ferocity in his expression.
My tongue stroked over my suddenly dried lips.
“I needed to see you,” I admitted.
I might not have seen him in years, but he was still the one person in the world I truly trusted. The only one I could trust with this.
His plush lips thinned. “You didn’t see the No Trespassing signs posted all over my property?”
I chewed at the inside of my cheek as I peered over his shoulder to make sure they were safe before I looked back at him. “I thought they might not apply to me.”
“That so?” he challenged.
He said it like I was a stranger.
A trespasser.
Unwanted.
All the hurt and rejection came back at me full force. The fact that he’d just…left me.
After everything.
I still couldn’t understand it.
But none of that mattered now. It wasn’t what was important.
This was what was crucial.
I tipped my face up at him, and I gave him all my vulnerability. “I had to find you, Cash.”
“Why?” The single word was hooked on barely hinged fury.
“Because I need you.”
At my admission, a bristle of rage skated across his flesh, the muscles of his arms that were still crossed over his chest bulging and bunching with strength.
It was the first time I noticed the tattoo on the back of his left hand.
Two stacked Ss with a dagger running through them with an eye in the middle. At the top of the dagger was a torch. The flames coming from it curled up his wrist. Those flames seemed to weep. As if they were written in grief.
My own grief clotted off my throat, but I didn’t have time to acknowledge it because a laugh suddenly echoed from farther up the mountain. From the tent that was hidden under the shelter of the trees.
Cash whipped that way.
Shock froze his giant body when he saw my children sitting on a blanket in front of the tent.
I instructed them not to move from that spot while I quickly bathed in the river, never fully letting them out of my sight while I washed the scum off my body after hiding out here for two days.
Today had been the day I was going to gather enough courage to go to Cash’s door.
The day I was going to plead with him for help.
“Mommy! Are you all done? I gotta go pee real, real bad!” My three-year-old, Eva, shouted it from the blanket. She waved her hands overhead and jumped toward the heavens like we hadn’t noticed her, her hair that was the same reddish, dark brown as mine whipping around her.
“Shh…” Addy chastised, my daughter who was seven and thought she was the boss of the other two. “We’re supposed to be really quiet in the woods. Don’t you remember we’re playing hide and seek with the man?”
“I think we already lost because he found us!” Colin, who was five, pointed a finger at Cash who gaped at the three of them.
The man nothing but a burly, rigid beast who looked like he was one second from coming out of his skin.
Maybe I was a fool for reaching out and touching him, but I couldn’t stop my hand from curling around his massive bicep.
He barely shifted his head toward me.
His hazel eyes were full of incredulity and cynicism and the ridging of fear.
They flickered from my face to my hand and back to my face again.
The muscle rippled beneath my hold.
I got the sense he couldn’t decide if he wanted to throw off my touch or toss me over his shoulder and drag the whole lot of us off his property.