Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 70488 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 352(@200wpm)___ 282(@250wpm)___ 235(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 70488 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 352(@200wpm)___ 282(@250wpm)___ 235(@300wpm)
I also made sure to coupon, ensuring that I always had a little bit of everything on hand so if the world came to an end, I could still make bread. Anything was possible with bread, right?
I still remember being in the one-room apartment we shared with my mother, asking my brother when my mother was supposed to come home and feed us. He’d given me this look that said that I was so naïve, and then left to come back with food.
It would only be later when I realized that Creed had gone out and stolen that food for us.
“Thank you for bringing me food,” I found myself saying. “There was this one time that Creed stole us some food from this fancy restaurant. And by fancy, I mean Texas Roadhouse. A couple had just left and had this bag of leftovers on a park bench while they posed for a photo. Apparently, they’d gotten some food to go for their son. It had this massive chicken-fried steak in it smothered in white gravy. Mashed potatoes. Corn. And all of these rolls and butter.”
“That why you like it so much?” he asked, watching me devour the meal.
He’d brought me exactly what I ordered from Hopps. However, no offense to Hopps, but nothing would ever hold a candle to that Texas Roadhouse chicken-fried steak.
Hell, at this point there probably were places that could make a better chicken-fried steak, but that place would forever hold a core memory inside of my brain that would never be superseded.
“Chicken-fried steak?” I shrugged. “I don’t know. I think it’s more of a comfort food at this point. I know there are way better things on the menu. I don’t even necessarily like fried things. They make me bloat and I get gassy. But when I’m feeling down, this is the meal that I order.”
He didn’t say anything more, just sat there while he watched me eat.
He never took his eyes off of me the entire time I was eating.
I ate fast, too.
Yet another habit that I’d probably never break.
You ate what you could before you were caught. Or before it was stolen. Someone couldn’t steal a roll out of your belly.
“I can’t finish another bite,” I groaned, looking down at the box of food in front of me.
He pulled the plate toward himself and downed the other half of the food. He ate the steak in three bites. The macaroni was gone in two. The corn in three.
He cleaned off the rest of the box with the rest of the bread, leaving an almost clean to-go container on the table in front of him.
“Were y’all ever poor and hungry?” I asked.
He grunted. “Not exactly.”
My brows rose. “What do you mean, not exactly?”
Before he could answer, Sage, the nurse who worked with us, poked her head in. “I don’t know if you’re finished or not, but your next patient is here. Room six.”
I gave her a thumbs-up, then stood up with a groan.
I leveled my gaze on Hux’s light-brown eyes and smiled. “Thank you for lunch, Hux.”
He grunted and gathered the trash, even going as far as sweeping the crumbs off the table into the to-go container before closing it and placing it in the trash.
I loved me a clean and tidy man.
I had no clue it was possible for Hux to get cuter, but there he was, making it happen.
Loud voices forced me to wave like a dumbass and hurry out, and I came to a stop outside my patient’s door.
I paused and listened to them talk. “No, you should’ve brought him in two hours ago when you called me and asked. I told you to bring him in right then, but noooo. You always know best. You had to get your content.”
I frowned with my hand on the doorknob, listening in and not trying to be circumspect about it.
“I wasn’t trying to get content. I just wanted to make sure she actually needed to go before I took her,” a woman replied to the man.
“I’ll bet if I look on social media, you’ll have a little video up showing how sick your baby is and what are some natural healing remedies you can give her to fix a broken arm.” The man snarled. “You make me sick. I was right. You can’t heal a broken arm with a poultice, Gemma!”
No, you certainly could not.
I opened the door and found myself in a room with a miserable-looking child around the age of thirteen who was sitting on the exam table completely quiet.
The child’s mother was sitting on the lone chair in the room scrolling on her phone.
The father was standing beside his daughter, wearing grease-stained coveralls and a scowl, his arms crossed over his chest.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m Bernice Daugherty. The nurse practitioner. The check-in nurse explained that Kaylee might have a broken arm?”