Total pages in book: 155
Estimated words: 154379 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 772(@200wpm)___ 618(@250wpm)___ 515(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 154379 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 772(@200wpm)___ 618(@250wpm)___ 515(@300wpm)
Draw his intentions out from the expensive leather of the seats.
I refused to be so stupid as to just place our safety in his big, foreboding hands.
I mean…God…look at him.
Out in the icy snow with the wind lashing through his thick black hair and licking over his heavily tattooed flesh.
Only wearing a fitted black tee and jeans.
Worn motorcycle boots on his feet.
The man was written in menace and peril.
A dangerous type of beauty that compelled.
A magnet that would suck you into an abyss before you even realized what hit you.
The last thing I needed was a dark, intimidating knight, and there he was, running around like it was his duty to save us.
God, how could I have been so careless?
But I hadn’t seen the black ice on the pavement.
At least I’d been going slow.
At least no one was injured.
At least—
“Can feel you spinning out up there just as fast as our car did, sweet girl.” Nelly reached up from where she sat directly behind me and set her hand on my shoulder. “Take a deep breath. We’re all fine, and that’s the only thing that matters. We’ll figure the car out later.”
My grandmother had always been my voice of reason.
The calm in the storm.
My guide and my hope and my support.
She also tended to take things far too casually for our dire situation.
“I know,” I muttered, my attention still pinned on the man who pulled our suitcases from the trunk then slammed it shut.
I had my duffel on the floor at my feet, refusing to let it out of my sight.
“Mommy, is okay. No worry. We aww fine.”
I shifted around to find my sweet Finn grinning from his seat, peeking at me from around the side of it, the single dimple in his right cheek out in full force.
My love for them squeezed my heart in a fist of desolation.
That love was the greatest thing I had.
The only thing I had.
I couldn’t let a mishap derail that and, right then, the only thing I felt was trapped.
“Yup, our Finny boy is right.” Nelly reached over and tickled his belly. “We’re all gonna be just fine. Just fine indeed.”
Finn giggled and tried to clutch at her hand. “You don’t tickwle me, my Newwy Bewwy.”
“What, I’m not allowed to tickle you?” she teased.
“No way!”
“Then what am I good for?” She drew it out like she had nothing else to offer.
“Hugs!” Finn shouted.
I would have sunk into the peace of their teasing if it wasn’t for the fact Theo had finished loading our things and was now rounding the front of his truck.
Stalking around it, really.
A vicious predator hunting for prey.
“My, my. Now that is something to look at.” Nelly hummed it from the backseat.
My stomach trembled.
I felt her statement to the core.
There was no chance I could look away from him.
He was tall and lean.
All stealthy, sinewy muscle.
Oozing with the kind of mayhem that should come with a warning label.
It was like watching a tsunami made purely of trouble rising from the distance and knowing there was no chance to outrun it.
“We are not ogling the nice man who stopped to help us.” I had to force it out.
She laughed outright, though her words were held in innuendo. “Oh, I bet there isn’t a single nice thing about him.”
She was right. Absolutely right.
Because I could barely breathe when he opened the driver’s side door and hopped into the cab.
The light that poured down from above glinted off the designs that crawled over his wet, bronzed skin, and snowflakes stuck to the tips of the longer pieces of his hair.
The fabric of his tee was soaked and clung to every etched, sculpted inch of his abdomen and chest.
A flicker of something I absolutely couldn’t feel flared in my belly.
A pang of desolate, acute attraction.
He ran a tattooed hand through his hair. “Storm’s raging out there. Have to admit, I was not expecting this.”
No.
I hadn’t been expecting it, either.
None of it.
Not the storm or the crash or this man who’d come up on us as if it was his life’s purpose to rescue us.
Thank God he stopped.
He could have driven by rather than throwing himself out into the frozen tundra to help us.
I flinched the second I thought it, subtly shaking my head. I couldn’t rely on him. Couldn’t trust him. I couldn’t trust anyone.
I needed to remember that.
“Guess it’s a good thing I had to make a trip into the city today and was coming back this way,” he said in a low voice. I had a hunch he meant it to be gentle, but it still cut like a growl.
“Yeah, I guess it was,” I managed.
Intensity billowed off him on suffocating waves. His presence was more commanding than anything or anyone I’d stumbled upon in all my life.
An energy crackled in the air.