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)
Short, thick eyelashes fell slowly over his eyes, and it took a moment for his shoulders to go up. “I’ll take whatever flavor you don’t want.”
I bit the inside of my cheek, thought about arguing, and picked a pink one—watermelon—to spice it up. Then I held them out again as Agnes pounced on Duncan, and he tried to nip her tail. Henri picked a green one—a surprising choice—and I kept the red one for my pup. I hesitated. He hadn’t been around before for our nightly expeditions. I knew he knew about them, but….
“I was going to take the kids outside. We usually play a little while and then have our popsicles…. Can I still take Agnes?”
He tilted his head to the side. “You don’t need to ask.” He wiggled the popsicle in his fingers. “I’ll go with you.”
“You sure?” I paused. “You’re not too tired? I heard you’ve been working a lot.”
“No.” He palmed the back of his neck. “I’m not too tired to play.”
He was going to play too?
I couldn’t do anything but smile at that idea as I nodded at him.
He just looked at me.
Was he being weird? Had I made him uncomfortable after all with the cinnamon smell and the cuddling before? That had been on my mind the last few weeks. Dealing with people was so complicated, especially when I didn’t have a magical nose. Because you could say whatever you wanted, but your body couldn’t lie about what it was feeling.
But I was the one who couldn’t hide anything, so too bad for me. I didn’t mind him coming. It’d give me an excuse to get a feel for him without the hectic pressure that came with breakfast. Just because we’d been in the same room together during that time hadn’t meant we’d gotten to talk a whole lot. On the mornings he was around, he’d been on his phone the majority of the time, sometimes answering his calls with “Blackrock,” but the majority of it being “Henri.”
Randall, the security guy I’d met in the woods right after we’d gotten here, hadn’t had a problem telling me all about how busy Henri was. The strawberry blond, I’d learned, was the only other person, apart from Henri, Agnes, MIA Franklin, and the other elders who were away, living in the clubhouse at the moment. We didn’t see each other often because he worked different hours almost daily, and he had family living at the ranch who he ate with often. He was a really nice guy, and my favorite part was that he gossiped as much as Matti did.
These freaking werewolves. There was a reason I loved them so much. I might not be willing to dig for details directly, but if they wanted to share that Henri hadn’t had a girlfriend in over a decade, I wasn’t going to tell them to shut up. But that was a thought for later.
For the time being, I decided to focus on the most important person in my life, not the one I wasn’t sure about. “Dunky, want me to carry you outside?” I asked as I put the popsicles into Agnes’s lunch bag, like we did every night. It had a unicorn on the side of it.
Red eyes met mine, and I felt that brush of consciousness touch my own. “No.”
I winked at him and focused on the little girl towering over my donut.
It was a shot in the dark, but I went for it anyway. You didn’t get anywhere in life unless you put yourself out there. Because my friendship with her might not have improved much yet, but she wasn’t someone I was giving up on, even if I was pretty sure she weighed about fifty or sixty pounds. “Agnes, would you like me to carry you?”
Her dead-eye glare said no, and I didn’t take it personally. What it did was make me smile. She was a tough cookie, but that was all right. Tough cookies didn’t crumble as easily.
If she let me, I was going to be one of the eggs that helped this snitch cookie stick together, because the little girl had gotten me appreciating who I’d turned out to be.
My story might not have been one that took place in an animated movie, but that was all right. I knew that my story was more of a gothic fairy tale than one with a castle in a sunny state, and I was okay with that. None of those princesses had puppies who could light someone on fire for them.
“All right then, come on, Donut and Mini Wolf. There aren’t too many clouds tonight, and maybe we’ll get lucky and see some shooting stars,” I told them before meeting Henri’s eyes and smiling a little again, just in case he was feeling awkward.