Total pages in book: 141
Estimated words: 132657 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 663(@200wpm)___ 531(@250wpm)___ 442(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 132657 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 663(@200wpm)___ 531(@250wpm)___ 442(@300wpm)
Of course she’d also looked adorable naked when he’d left her in bed. He didn’t suppose it was a good idea to be bossy and tell her to take off her clothes out here.
“I thought you were sleeping. Everything okay?” He gestured for her to join him.
“Can’t sleep, and it isn’t because I’m sore.” She huffed as she shifted to the chair across from him.
They’d moved her up to a much bigger plug earlier this evening after they’d used a violet wand on her and made her cry out. After she’d come three times.
He had to bite back a laugh because she sat down gingerly. Poor princess. “Do you want me to massage you?”
She snorted. “I think I’ll pass on the asshole massage. I’ve had that a couple of times already today.” She sat back. “It’s nice out here. I guess when Jensen talked to me about this place I got an idea in my head that it was awful. It’s beautiful here. The house needs some work, but you can’t argue with the view.”
She tilted her head up, looking at the blanket of stars spread across the sky.
It was spectacular, but nothing compared to her. She was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, and he was worried he was going to lose her. There was a distance during the day. When they were in bed or playing, she gave them everything. But she held back slightly in everything else. Nothing that would make it necessary to talk about, just distance that worried him.
The moonlight played over the river making it look like it was dancing. In the distance he could see the high grass sway. “No, you can’t. It is beautiful out here. During the summers there’s a pond about half a mile from the house where we used to swim when it got too hot to do anything else. I have no idea how, but the pond always stayed cool even when it was a hundred degrees out. I think when Jensen talks about this place, he’s talking about the emotional toll of living here. It’s beautiful land, but the town was hard on Jensen. Hard on his whole family.”
“He never liked to talk about his mother,” she said quietly. “He kind of avoided the subject. He didn’t talk much about his childhood, but he wouldn’t talk about her at all.”
It didn’t surprise Niall that Jensen had never gone into details with Harlow. “Well, I knew her. She was… She longed for something more than this place but had no idea how to get out. That’s not exactly right. She decided she did know.”
Harlow nodded. “Let me guess. She thought a man would take her away.”
She was a perceptive woman. One of her many talents. “Yes. She was the only daughter of ranchers, but they died in a car accident a year before Jensen was born. I don’t think they prepared her for much more than getting married and helping her husband with the ranch. They never expected her to run it herself. She was supposed to get married to someone they approved of and he would be trained.”
Harlow’s nose wrinkled. “That sounds terrible but then it’s not like my dad wanted me to take over the family business either.”
“I don’t think it’s exactly the same. They weren’t worried about Jensen’s momma getting killed in the line of duty,” he explained. “They simply didn’t think a woman could run the ranch.”
“She wasn’t married when her parents died? How old was she? How did she handle things?”
He was glad she was at least curious. “She was barely nineteen, and she didn’t. She spent all her time either helping her mom with chores or going to the church in town. She had no idea what to do. Jensen’s dad was their foreman, and he almost immediately married her and got her pregnant, but what he actually wanted was the ranch.”
“Did something happen to him? Because I know she sold off most of the land to a big ranch collective,” she replied. “I have some connections in that world. Jack’s parents own a big ranch outside of Austin, as do some of my parents’ closest friends. Selling any land would be the option of last resort for them. The ranchers I know would never sell unless they were going to lose it all.”
She did know how to point out a problem. “Jensen’s dad might have been a foreman, but ranching wasn’t exactly his dream. From what I’ve heard he mostly wanted to be rich. Didn’t care how it happened. What he wanted was the money that came with the ranch. He convinced her to sell off some of the land so they could upgrade the house. Which was always going to happen soon. He kept putting it off. She was pregnant and she’d been taught that a good wife didn’t question her husband, so she did what he asked. A little land became a lot of land until they were left with this space and then Jensen’s dad took off with the cash.”