Total pages in book: 23
Estimated words: 21817 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 109(@200wpm)___ 87(@250wpm)___ 73(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 21817 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 109(@200wpm)___ 87(@250wpm)___ 73(@300wpm)
And where do I find her?
On a damn flyer for some sick twisted auction for young women.
They're trying to auction off my mate.
Not on my watch.
I'll do anything to be the winning bidder.
I'll give everything I have for my sweet mate.
And if these billionaires still manage to outbid me...
Well, I'll pull out the ace in my sleeve.
My vicious protective Kodiak bear.
Then there won't be saving any of them.
She's going home with us.
And I don't care what I have to do to make that happen.
The series where the Highest Bidder always wins.
Welcome to a one-of-a-kind Auction House where humans, shifters, and aliens bid on love.
These ultra-rich men are ready to bring home their virgin prizes.
Are you ready to join in and wish you were the one on the auction block?
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
Chapter One
Ava
Five years. I can’t believe it’s already been five whole years.
I stare at the crappy store-bought cupcake on the counter of the reception desk and sigh. It doesn’t even look good. Just empty calories with no taste.
In a way, this cupcake is perfectly fitting to celebrate an anniversary of this mind-numbingly boring job—It offers no excitement and it will leave a bland taste in my mouth just like this place does to me every single day.
Five freaking years. The days go by so slow, but the years… they go by even slower.
I’m only twenty-five, but somedays I feel as old as Harold.
“Hi Harold,” I say as he shuffles by with his nose in a dusty old tomb of a book. The binding is cracked, the pages are yellow, and it seems to be disintegrating before my very eyes.
He grumbles something and doesn’t look up. This old weathered man, who is my only coworker by the way, barely ever says a word to me. And when he does, it’s to ask if I’ve seen some rare obscure philosophical text by Confucius’ barber or something similar.
That’s life in The Relic Repository. We’re a library in Seattle that specializes in old obscure ancient texts. We have rows upon dusty rows of religious texts, philosophical texts, historical texts, and old ancient literary texts. If it’s old and boring, we have it. What we don’t have are windows. Apparently, sunlight is one of the main enemies to these old brittle pages, so the only window—a tiny one along the right wall—is covered by an old painting of some wrinkly monk.
Sometimes when Harold is in the back, engrossed in a giant book about ancient Egyptian accounting practices or something equally boring and dull, I’ll move the painting and stare into the alley for a few minutes.
I really wish it would open. I’ve gotten used to the stale musty smell in here, but sometimes it hits me out of the blue and I long desperately for some fresh air.
“Harold,” I say as he continues shuffling past the reception. “Guess what?”
He sighs with annoyance as he tears his eyes off the old yellowed pages and turns to me. His brown eyes are small and beady behind his thick round glasses. His gray eyebrows are out of control as usual and he’s wearing the same tweed jacket and brown tie that he’s worn all week. At least, he’s changed his shirt.
“I couldn’t possibly guess what goes on in that feeble brain of yours,” he says in a dry scratchy voice. His voice makes him sound like he’s one hundred years old, but his appearance makes him look like he’s one hundred and five.
“It’s about the cupcake,” I say with a grin. “Guess what today is.”
“Your birthday.”
“Nope.”
He stands there staring at me like it’s taking all of his energy and patience to tolerate my ‘generation’s dullness of intellect’—a favorite saying of his.
“It’s my fifth anniversary of working here,” I say with jazz hands. “Can you believe it?”
“Call me when you get to fifty years.”
He turns back to the ancient volume in his hands and continues shuffling into the back.
I sigh as I stare at the cupcake. Is it too early to eat it? It’s too early to eat it. This dull bland cupcake will be the excitement of my day and I want to make it last. It’s only 9:16, so I have a long monotonous day ahead of me.
On a busy week, we’ll get about eight people coming in here, mostly professors and scholars who find what they want on their own and quietly read in a corner or take a photo of the pages on their phones and then leave.
It’s a dark dreary place with peeling paint and stained carpets that lost their color around the ‘70s from what I can tell. I thought this job would be exciting. I thought it would be an adventure.
I thought that thrilling characters like Indiana Jones and that guy from The Da Vinci Code would be bursting in here to look up some ancient texts to help on their next adventurous crusade. I thought they would take me along with them as their sexy/sassy love interest.
But alas, no. The only type of people coming in here are like Mrs Tuffin, a quiet professor who reads through boring old religious texts while crunching on carrot sticks.
Fuck it.
I sigh as I grab my cupcake, sit back in my chair, open my romance novel, and get to work on another thrilling day as I take a big bite of the bland frosting. It’s even worse than I thought it would be.
Five years…
I can’t even focus on the words. I read the same sentence four times and I can’t grasp any of it. With a sigh, I toss the book on the desk and stare at the yellow stains on the ceiling.