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)
And that had just been in the first four hours.
“Nina! Nina! Watch this! Watch this!” Pascal shouted until I gave him another thumbs-up and he threw himself into a cartwheel.
I drew the number 10 on my whiteboard and held it up.
The little boy started jumping up and down like he’d won a gold medal.
“He’s so dumb,” Agnes muttered from a few feet away. She had decided from the beginning she wasn’t participating in their competition—the prize was two strips of my beef jerky—and had sat off to the side, drawing with markers.
In between us, Shiloh let out a little laugh that had me peeking at him. He had done a couple of cartwheels before wandering over and plopping down so close to me that he’d kneed me in the thigh. He was stacking flat rocks on top of each other, or at least that’s what he was trying to do while wearing my bracelet.
That was a new thing with the kids, them taking turns each day wearing it when they got home from school. I wasn’t sure how they decided who was going to get it, but I went along with it. I loved it because I got the cutest reaction from them every time I took it off. “You smell soooo yummy, Nina,” Shiloh had cooed as he’d let me put it on him.
They liked the way I smelled with my bracelet on, but without it?
Their comments were good for my soul.
One of the ogre boys, Billy, did a beautiful cartwheel. I wrote 10 with a smiley face beside it.
“We’re gonna do one at the same time!” two very sweet werewolf twin girls yelled before they chatted for a moment, nodded seriously at one another, and twisted into their own cartwheels. They got a 10 with two hearts.
The ogre boy and Pascal huddled together, and I wondered what they were planning on doing. You never knew with these crazy asses.
Agnes’s head shot up, her upper body twisting around just as I felt a familiar presence from the same direction.
“Nina!” Pascal started shouting. “Nina! Nina! Check this out!” He and the other boy high-fived and did two back-to-back cartwheels as the strength—and proximity—of the magic behind me got stronger. I drew them a score of 10 with two stars on either side, and the way they did some dance I had never seen before made me grin.
A figure approached and crouched beside Agnes, speaking to her softly, and out of my peripheral vision, I saw Shiloh set his rocks down and get a hug from our visitor.
One of the twins yelled, “I can do a roundoff, Nina!”
To which Pascal shouted, “Me too!” before he froze. “What’s that?”
Snickering, I watched the girl do a cartwheel but land with both feet instead of one at a time. I wasn’t sure what the boys told them, but she did another, and that got them trying to replicate one—they looked like cartwheels to me though.
Two hands landed on my shoulders then, and I turned my head to see the face I’d been expecting. The eyes I had memorized at this point. The cheeks and jaw I might be able to draw from memory too.
I couldn’t go as far as to say that he looked different, but Henri did somehow. Maybe it was his energy, maybe it was the brightness in his eyes, or it might have even been the faint curve to his mouth. He looked better than ever.
“Hey.” I grinned at him. “You’re back soon.”
“I missed home,” he admitted.
Before I could ask him where he’d gone, how it had gone, or if he wanted his phone back, this wonderful man leaned toward me and pressed his lips against mine, softly, sweetly, a smooth touch that lasted a single second, but it might have been the longest second of my life.
“Thank you,” he murmured after he’d pulled back, his voice just about a whisper.
“For what?” I practically gasped, not sure what year it even was when my mouth could still feel the pressure from his lips, and he was looking at me like I’d brought a loved one of his back to life.
“For the nicest thing anyone’s done for me,” he replied.
I’d do nice things for him every day if that was what I got, I thought. I’d answer all his phone calls. At least most of them.
From the corner of my eye, I saw Shiloh’s head angled to watch us, his mouth wide open.
Henri must have seen it too because he let go of my shoulders like they were hot potatoes. His throat bobbed, and in the blink of an eye, his face had smoothed into his neutral one. “Did I miss anything?” he asked, all evidence of his affection gone.
Right.
All right then. I forced a smile like my mind wasn’t still centered on him kissing me a minute ago. There was a lot you could blame on being a werewolf, but that wasn’t one of them. And I wasn’t sure I could handle trying to guess why he’d done it, much less what it meant.