Total pages in book: 254
Estimated words: 240032 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1200(@200wpm)___ 960(@250wpm)___ 800(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 240032 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1200(@200wpm)___ 960(@250wpm)___ 800(@300wpm)
I gave his forearm another squeeze, so touched I wanted to put my hand over my heart. “In that case, thank you. I appreciate it.” I smiled at him even though he was focused in the direction of the windshield again. “You’re a good man, Henri Blackrock.”
When I let go of him, the way he turned to me….
“Don’t make that face. I’m not flirting with you.” I squinted at him. “I said you’re a good man, not….”
“You’re not asking me to marry you?” he cut me off with a straight face.
The gasp that came out of my body was a borderline shout. “And you tell me I’m a brat.” I shook my head, so completely caught off guard by the fact he’d bring it up, especially like that. Like in a joke. I laughed even harder. “I thought we were pretending I didn’t tell you what I told you!”
“It happened,” he muttered, his mouth twitching.
He thought this was funny?
I groaned. “Hear me out, I did not ask you to marry me. Your cousin—”
“You said he was yours just as much as he is mine.”
This was happening. Henri was messing with me. “He was yours first, and I only told you what he said because you asked!” I laughed some more and shook my head. “I knew you were going to make this weird after I told you, I knew it.”
This man who had just finished telling me all about how he was overworked and tired, smirked. Right then and there. I might have even called it a semi-smile.
I liked this version of him.
I liked it a lot.
He wasn’t at all what I expected, with all these different facets of him.
I was thinking about that as he slowed the vehicle to a crawl when we got to an even thicker section of forest with slim trees clustered so close together it was impossible to drive any further.
“We’ll have to go by foot the rest of the way,” he explained, shutting the side-by-side down and unbuckling his seat belt.
I did the same, meeting him at the front of the off-road vehicle. We had to split up to get around the aspens, the gaps between them too narrow. There were branches and rocks of all sizes scattered everywhere, and I slipped on wet leaves more than I was proud of. Half the time, he made sure I was mostly standing, but every once in a while, he pretended not to hear me mutter “shit” to myself.
“We’re almost there,” he let me know after a while.
“Okay.”
What he considered “almost there” was not what I considered “almost there,” that was for freaking sure. We came up to a steep incline that had to be a hill or a mountain hidden in the trees that I’d never seen before from the clubhouse. My calves and thighs burned sooner than my ego would have expected, and I started holding my breath for longer and longer periods so he wouldn’t hear me gasping.
“Do we need to take a break?” he asked from up ahead after a few more minutes.
Breathing through my nose had never been harder, and I really wanted to know what altitude we were at because my lungs were under the impression we were at eighteen thousand feet. “Are we almost there?”
Henri stopped. His face wasn’t red. He wasn’t even sweating, while I was sure he noticed that my face probably resembled a tomato, and I might need an inhaler. “Breathe through your nose.”
“Where else am I supposed to breathe from?” I gasped.
His eyebrows rose. “We’ll be there in five minutes. You going to make it?”
Swallowing hard, I waved him forward, really, really wishing I’d brought some water with me.
Henri’s eyes twinkled for a moment before he continued up the dang hill. He had the nerve to talk in a perfectly even voice. “His home is up ahead. If he’s rude, we’re leaving. If you feel uncomfortable, we’re leaving. Am I clear?”
“Got it, your Royal Wolfiness,” I confirmed.
He slowly turned to look at me. His nose wrinkled a little.
I smiled at him, trying so hard to breathe normally when I wanted to wheeze.
His nose stayed scrunched, then he did that “come here” gesture with his index finger that was way more attractive than it should have been.
Maybe I should have asked what he wanted, but I didn’t. I stepped right up to him, so close I had to tip my head back. Henri dipped his, and at least half my brain cells stopped working as he lowered that masculine face—I knew he wasn’t going to kiss me, I knew it like I knew the exact shade of Duncan’s eyes—but still, the brain cells in my skull decided to make my heart race right then.
It wasn’t every day a gorgeous man got this close to me.
But instead of his mouth touching some part of my body, it was his cheek that moved across the top of my head. He tilted his neck so that he rubbed it across my ear and my own cheek… a little over part of my mouth too. He did the same with his other cheek on my other side.