Total pages in book: 136
Estimated words: 136247 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 681(@200wpm)___ 545(@250wpm)___ 454(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 136247 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 681(@200wpm)___ 545(@250wpm)___ 454(@300wpm)
The voice is familiar...I think?
A tingle zips up my spine and I open my eyes.
I probably recognize it because I’ve seen more than one Ridge Barnet movie. The guy is Captain McHottie and a half. And newly, happily, till-death-do-they-part married.
Totally off the market for this damsel in distress.
Not that I’d ever be in the running in an alternate universe. Or that I’m even looking.
I’ve logged off the male gender for a good long while after Jean-Paul showed me just what lying, conniving, heartless backstabbers some guys can be.
“I’m fine!” I call out as loudly as I can in my mortified state. “Got it all under control here. Just waiting until they’re inside to shut the gate!”
“You sure about that, Peach?”
Sarcasm is the last thing I need right now. “Yes, really.”
Peach?
Again, this weird sense of familiarity hits.
I chance a glance at Owl, see he’s still chasing down a couple of goats, and then make a quick count of the beasts already inside the fence. Nine. Including the black one standing in the opening, watching me with a glint in his eye identical to Lucifer’s. “Just three more to go.”
“You know goats can sense rain coming, don’t you?”
“Rain?” I glance up.
Where the hell did that dark cloud come from? Me, probably, considering I always have a black cloud over my head. The chaos today proves it.
“Yep. They’ll go right for the closest shelter at the first hint of a storm coming. Which, right now, appears to be your trailer.”
Crap, he’s right. Two goats are sprinting toward the gate from inside the fenced-in field.
“Oh, no, no, no.” I rock the gate, trying to make it move, but now it’s like the stupid thing is stuck. “Son of a biscuit eater!”
“Tory Redson-Riddle-Coffey? Shitfire, it is you,” the stranger says.
It bops me like a boulder to the head.
That Oklahoma twang I haven’t heard in years.
I whip my head around so fast my neck pops.
I’m staring at a dangerously handsome, wickedly amused, very built man smiling dead at me.
He’s older, bigger, and broader than I remember, but he has the same boyish dimples behind a dark scratch of beard.
The same emerald-green eyes drinking me in with a gaze that used to stir me up like a blender.
The same forehead, aquiline nose, and neat ears perched in a face that still looks like it was crafted by Michelangelo.
The same good-natured slip of a smile on his chiseled face—a half smirk, but not a cruel one. More like the kinda smile that says he knows a scandalous secret, and you’ll spend every second you’re with him just itching to find out what he knows.
Holy Hannah.
My hold on the gate slips. Squealing, I catch myself from falling at the last second, yanking myself forward and finding my footing on the metal.
“Quinn? Quinn Faulkner?” It rushes out of me in total disbelief.
“Don’t wear my name out, Peach. I knew it was you. I’ve only ever heard two people say son of a biscuit eater in my entire life,” he says, scratching at his chin. “You and your granny.”
I shrug, because that’s true, and then ask the obvious.
“I...I thought you were Ridge? What’re you doing here at his house, anyway?”
“I was wondering the same about you,” he says smugly, lifting a brow. “I’d tell you now, but something tells me you’d be a lot happier getting off that thing. Here, let me—”
Owl interrupts with a loud series of barks.
“The goats! Wait, I have to make sure they don’t wander.”
Quinn nods once. He must know dog-speak, too, because he shoots down the ditch and up the other side like it’s nothing, shooing the goats back into the fence, including the devil goat.
I jerk harder on the gate. Definitely stuck. It won’t budge.
So I start working my way along the metallic piping, toward the fence, wondering why on earth this gate is so long, just as Owl chases the last three horned beasts through the opening.
My foot slips, scratching at the ground, and pain shoots up my leg.
Wincing, raw fire surges to my knee.
The injury warns me it’s had its fill of this, and I’m sensing it’s the only warning I’ll get.
God. I pause, breathing through the pain, but I’ve barely sucked in a gulp of fresh air when the gate starts swinging closed.
A strong pull is all it takes before I’m hovering over solid ground again with Quinn.
No, actually, he’s facing my back when the gate finally clicks shut.
I’m almost afraid to turn around.
If Ridge Barnet is a Captain McHottie, Quinn Faulkner is two and a half superhero hunks.
He was...
Kinda my first boyfriend.
Totally my first raging crush.
Absolutely, positively my best friend on the long, hot summers of small-town teenage hijinks here in Dallas that always made the Windy City a distant memory.
The first two things were completely unknown to him, of course—and I plan to keep it that way.