Total pages in book: 102
Estimated words: 100367 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 502(@200wpm)___ 401(@250wpm)___ 335(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 100367 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 502(@200wpm)___ 401(@250wpm)___ 335(@300wpm)
The one that no one else has ever wanted to keep around for long.
“Do you hear me,” he continues, his voice harder now. More commanding. He’s not lazy and laid back now, and I fucking love it.
“I hear you.”
“Good. Because now that I’ve tasted you, it won’t be enough, Duchess. So, if this is as far as you want it to go, you need to say so now before I bury myself ten inches inside of your perfect pussy and make you mine.”
Um. Holy shit.
“I don’t want you to stop.”
He kisses my neck, my jawline, and then returns to my lips and kisses me so tenderly, it almost brings tears to my eyes.
“Good. Now, we really do have to work, but we’ll revisit this later.”
“I can’t wait.”
I’ve been buzzing all day. We got through the barn chores fairly quickly. I was wrangling kittens who have discovered their legs and like to run around the barn, under our feet, and get into trouble.
Tom just looks at me like I can’t do a damn thing with these kids.
It kind of cracks me up.
Then, I officially met Sylvester, the orange cat that was on the porch the first day I arrived. Apparently, he roams the property, looking for food and mischief.
He’s sweet. And likely the father of Tom’s little brood of babies.
“You don’t have a dog,” I say as Tucker and I fill a water trough for the goats.
“I did have one for about twelve years,” he replies. “He passed last fall, and I haven’t had the heart to get something new. Although, a ranch doesn’t really feel complete without a mutt or two running around. Do you like dogs?”
I watch him and nibble the inside of my cheek, unsure how to answer that. My usual response is to blow off the question, to act nonchalant.
But that’s lying, and I don’t want to lie to Tucker.
“I’ve never owned a dog, and aside from working with them in school, I’ve never really been around animals.”
Tucker leans on the fence and watches me with sober green eyes, waiting patiently for me to continue.
“You work well with animals,” he says carefully.
“At first, I had to make myself be calm around them,” I admit. “When I started school, I was scared shitless.”
“Of dogs?”
“Of everything.” I press my lips together and look out at the pasture, at the cows grazing and the birds flying overhead. Spring has settled in, and it feels good out here in the sunshine. I don’t like being vulnerable with people. I’m not good at it, and I don’t usually let my guard down.
“Why were you afraid of animals, Duchess?”
I take a deep breath, and the words start to tumble out of me, as if I have to tell him. As if keeping it inside will tear me apart.
“Not only did my father think that us girls shouldn’t work the ranch, he wouldn’t let us anywhere near the animals. Well, not for fun, anyway. We had chickens and stuff, and Dani had to get the eggs. If she did something wrong, he’d make her watch while he plucked them and tortured them while they were still alive.”
He shuffles his feet, and I keep talking.
“To this day, she has a full-blown panic attack at the idea of being around chickens. Bridger, her husband, can talk her down. Then, my father discovered that he enjoyed making Alex, Dani’s twin, suffer by torturing animals in front of her.”
“What in the actual fuck?” Tucker growls, but I keep talking. I can’t stop.
“If a dog or cat wandered onto the property, they didn’t wander off again. Poor Alex, to this day, she can’t do pets of any kind. She can’t be around animals at all. Sometimes he did it in front of all of us, but Alex got the worst of it.”
“What did he do to you, Darby?”
I rub my lips together and take a physical step back, panic settling into my chest.
“Oh, I’m fine, I—”
“Hey.” He moves to me and pulls me into his arms, hugs me to his chest, and I melt right into him. “Sometimes, it’s okay to not be fine. It’s okay. It doesn’t make you weak or annoying or frustrating. It makes you human, sweetheart. What did the asshole like to do to you?”
My heart is pounding now because I’ve never told anyone this. My siblings think they know, and they were privy to some of it, but never everything because I wouldn’t allow them to know.
Not even Holden.
“If I tell you,” I whisper against his chest, “I’ll never speak of it again.”
“Deal.”
I clear my throat and swallow hard, and he tightens his hold on me, hugging me to him.
“I’m right here,” he whispers against my ear. “And I’m not going anywhere.”
“He liked—” I clear my throat again. I can feel the pain on my back and arms, the way the blood would flow down my skin and sting. Tears fill my eyes. “He liked to make me bleed. He cut me often, almost always on my back, but sometimes he’d wrap barbed wire around my upper arms and then pull until I had a hundred cuts all over and then drag me around.” Yeah, I’m babbling now, because if I don’t say it all at once, I’ll never talk about it, and he should probably know how fucked up I am before this goes any further. “He loved it when I bled. He loved it. But he always did it where I could wear clothes so the scars didn’t show, and so people didn’t ask questions. I didn’t sleep on my back for years.”