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)
He was used to getting his way, but I was an only child, and so was I.
I knew he liked me. And if I had to choose anyone on this ranch to mate with, it would be him. Without a doubt, Henri would be every number on my top ten list. The idea of marrying someone else…. The more I thought about it, the more I hated it.
And if you don’t like something, do you know who’s going to change it? Only you will.
So before I could talk myself out of it and remind myself why I shouldn’t, why I’d thought “never again” already, I snagged his gaze and held on.
“Unless you’ve changed your mind,” I told him with a wobbly smile. “I’m good at snuggling, and I’m pretty good at brushing coats out.” It was only a tiny victory that’s what I decided to say instead of telling him the ten other inappropriate things that I could have gone with, like having strong fingers and how I used to own a shake weight.
But that small mercy didn’t seem to do much for him.
I’d watched a lot of storms roll in over the years. Big, grayish purple storms that bubbled over mountaintops and beautiful hills. And yet, I hadn’t seen one move the way I watched his expression literally morph in front of my eyes. He seemed… frustrated? Maybe angry?
But I’d swear his gaze flicked down the front of me for one second before he zeroed in on my face again, and his voice was low and rough as he murmured, “I see.”
Yeah, I bet he saw.
Or maybe he was annoyed that I was still bringing this up after he’d let me down.
I could tell he was bothered from the way his body tensed. Then his hands fell away from where they’d been on me, and he leaned back. Away. From me. “Wake me up if you hear anything again, Nina.”
He might as well have tossed a bucket of warm water on me.
I see.
I wouldn’t wake him up. His room was on the floor above mine, but I didn’t know which door was his. But even if I did, I wasn’t going to bring the dreams up in his presence, not when he was looking the way he was right then. Uncomfortable, mostly. Frustrated and possibly angry. But I nodded.
And when Henri got up and left my room a couple heartbeats later, taking his warm, comforting presence with him, I watched it happen with a knot in my stomach.
But it was what it was. I’d tried to put myself out there one last time, just in case, hoping, and hoping, and hoping some more. He was going to do what he wanted to do.
And I had to do what I needed to do.
Relying on him so much, expecting anything from him, was only going to hurt one person in the long run, and that person wasn’t going to be him.
It’d only be me who got hurt.
Chapter
Nineteen
“How’s the number 2 love of my life?”
I melted on the other side of my phone’s camera, torn between so much love my body could barely handle it and wanting to slap my hands against my face so I could muffle the scream that had been steadily building in my body over the last few days. I hadn’t purposely kept things from my two closest friends in the entire world, but there were some things that were easier to explain verbally than through text.
Plus, I knew Matti and Sienna; they were going to want the whole story, not just part of it.
And Sienna showed me just how well she knew me when she lunged forward, so close into her own phone’s forward-facing camera that all that was visible was a single green eye and a perfectly plucked eyebrow. “What happened?” she demanded.
Did she have any idea she’d picked up Matti’s video call habits? I let it go for now as I leaned against the seat of my travel trailer’s dining room table slash bed, not sure where to start even though I had already planned parts of this conversation out so we could cover everything. That’s why I was in the trailer, to give myself the closest thing to privacy I could get without driving an hour away. Nothing I had to say was worth the gas. And too many people came in and out of the clubhouse for that to be a proper venue for our conversation.
“That good?” Sienna’s eye got even closer so I couldn’t see anything but a blurry iris and pupil.
“‘Good’ is a stretch,” I told her honestly, slumping into the refinished seat. I had redone it myself four years ago when I’d parked outside of Sienna’s parents’ house and spent a month and a half refurbishing my trailer with the help of her dad.