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 lastly, the brothers would invite their young sibling to come and live with them. They would promise to care for him and teach him….
My eyes started watering, dang it, and I lifted my arm to wipe at my face with my forearm before the side of Wolf Henri’s cheek lowered and he let me use him as a napkin.
Everything was going to be fine.
We had gone over this a hundred times by this point. It was just fear that made me irrational.
Even if Duncan decided he wanted to go, we’d all leave together. And maybe one day, when he was old enough, he might go off on his own and live his life wherever and however he wanted, like all children did.
I wiped my eyes on Henri again, curling my fingers into his coat, holding on to him, letting him anchor me and ease the worries and the fear of a future I had no control over.
But that was life in general.
My parents had left their parents, and then I’d left mine, and that was the way things were. But it didn’t mean anyone forgot. It didn’t mean there weren’t visits. That anyone was really, truly left behind. That there wasn’t love.
You could never forget love.
Love was the one thing that could survive illness and distance, and even time.
My throat was in a knot as the hellhound brothers eventually stopped talking, and the three of them stared at each other, communicating telepathically, I assumed.
My stomach sank when one brother smiled gently, then so did the other. And I watched one of them nod and dab at his face, joy writing itself all over his craggy features. They were really nice men.
And I couldn’t look. I couldn’t. I tipped my head up to the moon, reclined even more into Henri, and I thought that I loved this place, this ranch, and remembered what I’d told myself when we first got here.
The grass would always be green where you took care of it.
I could love anything I watered. A person, a place, a plant, a life.
I could be happy wherever Duncan and Henri were. Even wherever my little bonsai cactus hybrid, Agnes, was. They were what mattered. Not the mountain range, not the magic, not money, or much less people who didn’t matter. The sun would shine almost everywhere, and the moon would continue its reign no matter where we ended up.
And I was so busy thinking that I had moved so many times, once more wouldn’t make a difference, that I wasn’t ready for the body that slammed into me.
For the “no, no, no, love, love, love” that my donut projected at me, each word one dart after another. “Family, family, family,” Duncan chose.
Chapter
Thirty
THREE YEARS LATER
Adding on to my never-ending list of things in my life I would’ve never expected to encounter, I had one more to pencil in—arguing with a sasquatch about the benefits of using a filter in a showerhead.
“Do whatever you want, Spencer,” I said as we walked through the woods, the moon our only source of light. “I’m just telling you what I read.”
Beside me, I caught Henri glancing down, his face that smooth mask he usually wore around most of the ranch members, but that gleam in his eye was all Tease Henri. My Henri. The one who got a kick out of me giving a giant, pain-in-the-ass mythical creature a hard time for being stubborn.
“I will do whatever I want,” Spencer grumbled back from his spot on my other side, with several feet separating us. He sniffed, his overly long arms swinging at his sides. “I’ll consider it.”
He’d consider it. I lifted my eyes as subtly as I could and raised my eyebrows at Fluffy, who looked even more amused than he had a moment before. We could laugh about it later, in bed, like we usually did. It was the only place where we both felt comfortable talking about everything and anything that we couldn’t around the ranch without the worry of being overheard.
Not that Henri kept his thoughts and opinions to himself—he was an expert at expressing them as politely and politically as he could manage—but sometimes a man had to unload.
And so did I.
And we did it in our soundproof bedroom, where we could complain about the dumb crap members of the ranch did that we couldn’t comprehend.
And it was where we could gossip.
In this case, I had a feeling we were going to have a good laugh over pissy freaking Spencer being concerned his hair was flat—his words, not mine. He’d been trying different hair treatments and nothing was working, he claimed. Conditioner wasn’t cutting it anymore.
While we weren’t friends, and he still had a chip on his shoulder that could probably block out the sun for a minute or two, the sasquatch and I had eventually come to an understanding—sort of—after the night that he’d said whatever it was that had pissed off my DNA dad enough to threaten him. I’d bought him two more conditioner bars, and Henri and I had gone to deliver them a week later. And that had sparked our… frenemies-ship. More friends than enemies, but with his prickly personality, I had a feeling that was as good as anyone was ever going to get with him.